Category: meta

Where Do I Fit?

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This morning I was thinking about my political orientation and wondering where I fit. I’m independent from a republican region. I am more and more in favor of a smaller federal government. I am convinced that we rely too much on the government, especially for things that the government is not well-suited to address. Libertarian ideals hold some appeal for me, except that I think there should be some measure of social norms that people should conform to – the chaos of anything being acceptable does not make an environment conducive to prosperity. This sounds republican so far, but I also believe that there are things that are more in line with the democrats or green party – such as the need to be responsible in our treatment of the earth and its resources – that tend to be ignored more in republican circles in favor of shortsighted business interests.

Conveniently, I ran into a pre-debate analysis of tonight’s republican presidential debate which offered some insights for me:

To what extent are the candidates going to be playing to a national audience rather than a California audience . . . There are issues that are important here — the environment and global warming, energy conservation, stem cell research — that are not as important in other states.

From the sound of it I have a lot in common with California Republicans – who’d have guessed.

Tags affiliation, thoughts

life meta

Reach Upward

I have been wanting to post some thoughts on Scott Hinrichs post Gross Incompetence? As I have come back to it, I realize that I could quote much of the same material he is quoting or I could thoroughly botch an attempt to add something to what he said. Instead I have decided to share this as an example of the thoughtful posts that I have come to enjoy from Scott. He comes up with some good sources and always leaves you thinking.

I agree with him about 95% of the time. The other 5% I consider that I have not yet formed an opinion on the subject. Never can I reject his arguments outright, and never do I finish reading a post from Scott and feel I’ve wasted my time.

Tags connections, reactions

life meta

Citizenship

I am very interested in being an active participant in my community. Currently I am participating with a community group which has yet to name itsself. Members of the group should be getting an email soon from our group leader inviting them to come to my site and vote in the poll on my sidebar in an effort to chose a name for ourselves. I will continue to give some updates on the group activities here, although more details will be available when our group gets a name and a website (pending).

Tags community

life meta

Holidays

Post author By David
Post date December 29, 2006
1 Comment on Holidays

I’m guessing that it will be normal for me to post less often during the holidays. Hopefully 10 day breaks will not be normal.

Besides the obvious Christmas festivities and work, I have been doing very good with my running until this week. Sometime on Christmas day my right ankle began to hurt. I went running on the 26th and, although running was fine, I noticed that my ankle got worse. My Achilles tendon began to swell some so I have been staying off it for the last few days. I don’t know how it happened, but I have to assume that it is related to the running. Hopefully resting it this week will allow me to get back to training sooner than if I pushed harder. I’m going to give it a try with a short run tomorrow.

I’m still trying to find the balance of what I write about here. I was doing lots of candidate endorsements before the break, but I want a better balance. I have found that there are two new candidates who have filed with the FEC since I last wrote. I guess I had better get caught up again because it looks like we are likely to have even more in the coming weeks.

Last night I got a call from my Grandpa and we got to catch up. I had not talked to him for a few months as he has been busy with his new wife trying to keep up with their combined 48 grandchildren. I don’t know about her grandchildren, but I realized that of his 24 grandchildren half of them were married so we’re all getting spread out a bit.

I can only imagine how busy it would get trying to keep up with 48 grandchildren. Anyway, it was nice to catch up with him, that’s why I decided to do a little catching up here.

Tags candidates, Christmas, endorsements, family, holidays, thoughts, work

meta technology

Code for Old Blog Tools

I thought I would add the html code from some blog elements that I am putting away but which I may want to use again.

Here is the html code for the election projections:

<a href=”http://www.electoral-vote.com/”><img alt=”Click for www.electoral-vote.com” src=”http://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2006/Icons/ev-small.png” border=”0″ height=”72″ width=”72″ /> <img alt=”Click for www.electoral-vote.com” src=”http://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2006/Icons/ev-small-house.png” border=”0″ height=”72″ width=”72″ /></a>

Tags code, tools

culture meta technology

Political Polling

I have begun to wonder how people view presidential hopefuls before the heavy campaigning gets underway. To that end I have created a poll on my blog where people can vote for those people who have been identified as potential candidates for whom they would be willing to vote.

You can vote as often as you would like – I believe that the poll will only allow a person to vote once every two weeks.

I was only allowed to include 20 options in the poll I created so I included 10 of the most prominent republican hopefuls and 10 of the most prominent democratic hopefuls. I have listed all of them alphabetically. I have made no indication of their party affiliation, although some of them will be obvious.

There were another 11 potential candidates that I could have included. If I notice candidate who are consistently failing to get noticed in the poll I may drop them and add some of these other candidates that I could not include.

What I had wanted initially was a ranking system similar to the way college football teams are ranked where voters would rank the various candidates and their rankings would be weighted to give an overall ranking. If anyone has an idea of how I could do that I would love to hear about it.

I am looking to have this circulated as widely as possible so feel free to let friends of all political persuasions know about this poll. Also I would appreciate if anyone has any ideas of how else I can make this poll known to a wider audience.

UPDATE: I have decided to make create a separate page for the poll so that it is not necessary to scroll to see it. It will still be included on the sidebar here, but it can also be found at http://mr.david.miller.googlepages.com/poll.html. If anyone does choose to share the poll with their friends, that page is where they should probably point.

Tags poll