I LOVE Blogs!

I believe blogging weekly instead of writing a research paper was beneficial for several reasons:

-Blogging required students to think critically about numerous topics, events, and ideas stressed in class. A term paper usually sets focus on one topic that an individual must research by itself or they already knows information about. Blogging allows numerous ideas to be stressed.
-Blogging is new to many students including myself. Term papers are not. New things are exciting and inspirational for ideas.
-The weekly blogs that required reflection of class activities gave evidence to Mr. Tofias and Dana who was in class and participating.
-Blogging also allows students to write their opinions without being blasted for stupidity in front of the class

I do think the blog was a very good idea to judge participation and dedication to the class, however, I found it very difficult to participate to the extent that the syllabus required. Many people chose not to blog at all, some don't have responses from back to September. This was frustrating for me because it was hard to respond to others' blogs, and I felt I was responding to the same ones. I feel that those who did not blog weekly really hindered everyone else's experience and made the exercise seem unimportant.

I tried to blog weekly and participate in others' blogs. I did miss a couple blogs, including last week's which was about sorting(it slipped my mind,) but I feel as if i did a good job keeping up with class and providing a discussion for other students. I would give myself a B for the blogging grade because my few slip-ups did not affect greatly my participation, understanding and keeping up with class.

Critical Era

I feel like the 90's could be classified as a critical era in "slow-mo." There are particular requirements for an era to be classified as "critical" and many events have taken place to reflect these requirements in the 90's. However, these events have not not been rapid, and stability seems a little far off. To focus on the behaviors and public opinion, presented are a few reasons to why I feel one could consider the 90's as an "almost" critical era.

Public opinion and behavior seems to have flip-flopped in small shifts between right and left wingers. Bill Clinton won votes because of his domestic policies as opposed to previous international policy to contain the Soviet Union. After his term, the votes seem to reflect the shift to a less domestic focused policy to the pre-emption strategy of George W. Before Clinton, partisanship was greatly influenced by military, in the 90s I feel like this had worn off. The public's beliefs and actions show slow, moderate changes that have yet to climax into what our book describes as a traumatic event. In the future, I believe if Barak Obama and Hilary Clinton continue to have political influence that black and white partisanship may change drastically. The number of minority voter will increase and may have dramatic, traumatizing, results. I also believe that Guiliani may have the ability to attract moderate democrats with many of his political views and this may lead to shift in partisanship as well.

However, because the last few presidential elections have been so close, I feel there hasn't been any major shifts to classify the last two decades as critical. Until the point of a consistent majority is reached, I feel we are unable to determine whether or not we are stable or at what point we were at a critical era.

IRAQ

I'm very apprehensive about writing this blog, so I'm just going to give my straight opinion and those who disagree, more power to you.

I strongly feel as if the public is misinformed entirely too much to develop a strong definite stance on the Iraq issue. I believe that the public does not know 100% of the facts, so it is hard for me to judge the actions of our nation's government without some doubt. We would all like to hope that our government serves our best interest, but it seems more and more that this war lacked more than just strategy.

9/11 and Iraq are definitely two different conflicts, and yet they are continuously grouped together as if one was a catalyst for the other. I feel this is wrong and a poor reason to instigate war in Iraq. However I clearly do not know enough information to even try to make a correlation between the two. Is it possible that war was necessary and 9/11 was a foreseeable act that was not deterred on purpose? I relate this strongly to WWII. Pearl Harbor was a foreseeable act, we knew they were going to attack and we waited for Japan to do so(you may disagree.) We used Japan as a reason to enter the war in aid to France and Britain, similarly to the Iraq situation. Therefore I do agree that 9/11 was wrongly used in the decision to go to Iraq, but cannot make a complete judgement of whether it was necessary to do so or not.

Do I think we should pull troops out of Iraq? No, absolutely not, at least not right now. This is a dream we all may have but I believe we need to finish what we started, regardless of the reasoning for its start. Our main goal should be to involved more countries in decisions(yeah I know this is obviously not likely,) establish a government fit to run the country without intervention and slowly remove our troops. If we pulled out now, the war will have been for nothing, no positive ending, and lives that were lost could truly be considered a waste of life.

God bless our soldiers!

Also, I do realize I used the wrong colors to represent the parties below... ahem, I meant to do that(:

Candidate Evaluations

I chose Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and Republican Candidate Rudy Giuliani to evaluate.

We determined that Clinton is much more strategic with her campaign.
-She lets the fights come to her instead of instigating
-She attempts to win voters by being everyone's bff
-She uses her minority status to an advantage

Clinton's campaign relies on the publicity from her husband, former president Bill Clinton, and her strong ties to both New York and the Midwest. Hillary will win votes by telling you what you want to hear, not necessarily what actions she really will implement while in office. She's very much to left and looks funny.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7ROk2CKktI

Rudy Giuliani is less strategic.
-He supports many issues that conservative do not, therefore making him questionable to some Republicans
-He has a background of being a democratic moderate with a transition to being a socially liberal Republican... this sounds slightly flip-floppish to me

Giuliani's campaign relies on his involvement and praise while dealing with the events of September 11, but I feel sadly that he may have made up his own nickname of "America's Mayor." He is credited with the fight against organized crime in New York and is strong on immigration issues. The fact that Giuliani has been married three times, supports gay marriage and abortion rights may hinder his votes from strong right-wingers. However, this may attract many moderates and swinging democrats to his campaign.

Build Your Own Party

In our class exercise my group built a new party based on the demise of the our current Republican party. We(Tony, Nick, Shannon, Mike, myself) called ourselves the "Neo-Whigs," with an economically conservative yet socially moderate platform. We are pro-choice, strong on defense and support a flat-tax system. We support lenient gun laws and are neutral on religion issues. Our younger more moderate generations are our target voters with high hopes to maintain the older conservative republicans. Our campaigning will take place mostly in the Midwest, with exceptions to sway votes in CA and NY.

Our idea is good for the more moderate conservatives who steer clear from extremists. However, because our party does not focus on extreme morality, we may lose a lot of voters and support from those with strong religious participation. Because it seems that the demise of the Republicans is due to the split of the party, the Neo-Whigs may lose interest of those who are very much to the right.

The Neo-Whigs would no doubt pull voters from the Democratic party, and eliminate a middle independent candidate option. I think that this would end up with an independent rising as a strong conservative and then the party system would be back where it started conservative-moderate-liberal. For this reason, I don't believe that the Neo-Whig party is a strong direction to move in, because essentially it's just moving in a circle by pushing the independent to the back of the line.

In conclusion, the Neo-Whigs have strong ideas to receive votes, however I don't believe current parties could move in this direction because there is nowhere to go.

I'm totally not getting extra points

The current two party system in the United States has its benefits and downfalls. The signers of our Constitution were not strong believers in a party system, but ultimately today it is the basis of our elections for different reasons.

Benefits:
The two party system allows involvement of the public into decisions made by leaders elected. If there were to be only one party, it wouldn't matter what the public thought, or what their political concerns were. A two party system allows candidates to compete for public support by "listening." The two party system also calls for a more simple majority to win the election. This allows more than half of public to support the outcome. The two party system within Congress also allows for checks and balances of legislation with the President as well.
If there were to be more than two(sometimes three) parties, a simple majority may not win the election. This is turn would have more than half of the public lacking support for the outcome of an election. I think many smaller parties could be related to the development of factions, which is strongly advised against in the Federalist Papers.

Downfalls:
For obvious reasons, not everyone can be fairly represented by the existence of only two parties. Occasionally a strong independent candidate will rise, but campaigning only deters borderline republicans or democrats from voting for their respected party. Representatives are also very distracted by each other, and this distraction may result in less attention to the public. The two party system also deters more voters from the election polls as opposed to a multiple party system due to the fact that many people are not represented by the candidates who are running for office.