{"id":99,"date":"2006-11-08T18:48:17","date_gmt":"2006-11-09T01:48:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/famille.org\/?p=99"},"modified":"2010-08-12T11:59:13","modified_gmt":"2010-08-12T17:59:13","slug":"2006-midterm-recap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/famille.org\/?p=99","title":{"rendered":"2006 Midterm Recap"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So did you vote?\u00c2\u00a0 I did.\u00c2\u00a0 Here&#8217;s a recap of what happened in my district.<\/p>\n<p><strong>U.S. Congress<\/strong>: Jan Schakowski vs. Michael Shannon, 9th Congressional District<br \/>\nI&#8217;m no big fan of Jan Schakowski.\u00c2\u00a0 She&#8217;s a fairly typical liberal tax-and-spend Democrat, and this is her perfect congressional district.\u00c2\u00a0 I was researching her opponent, because I hadn&#8217;t seen one sign or seen any ads or heard anything about this race.\u00c2\u00a0 Michael Shannon starts out strong &#8211; opposes Bush&#8217;s heavy-handed diplomatic policy, wants to at least re-think Iraq if not take a step back, feels we should engage Socialist \/ Communist regimes in Latin America, yadda yadda yadda.\u00c2\u00a0 Then I clicked on a link on his website &#8211; &#8220;Ideas&#8221;.\u00c2\u00a0 Boy does he have them.\u00c2\u00a0 Too bad he&#8217;s nuts.\u00c2\u00a0 Turns out he doesn&#8217;t like the electoral system, and wants to amend it thusly:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Remap every congressional district after each election, so that it&#8217;s exactly 50% Democrat and 50% Republican.<\/li>\n<li>Give parents votes on behalf of their children<\/li>\n<li>Require any person who enters politics whose parent is also a politician to run under a different last name<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>These are Mr. Shannon&#8217;s REAL positions on the electorate system, as found at: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shannonforcongress.com\/ideas.html\" target=\"_blank\">http:\/\/www.shannonforcongress.com\/ideas.html<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 These may seem like great ideas on the surface, but once you put the beer down, they are just plain nutty.\u00c2\u00a0 So as difficult as it was for me to vote for a tax-and-spend Democrat, even that is better than a nut.\u00c2\u00a0 Outcome: Jan Schakowski won the race, 75% to 25%.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Cook County Board President<\/strong>:\u00c2\u00a0 When longtime board president John Stroger suffered a stroke just\u00c2\u00a0after the primaries, the Democratic Machine in Cook County had a tough choice to make.\u00c2\u00a0 No, I guess they didn&#8217;t, because they&#8217;re a machine, so they chose John Stroger&#8217;s son, Todd, to run in his place.\u00c2\u00a0 Forget about the other primary candidates like Forest Claypool, who ran a close second to John Stroger.\u00c2\u00a0 No.\u00c2\u00a0 He won&#8217;t do.\u00c2\u00a0 Instead, in the finest of Cook County Politics, the Cook County Democratic Organization <em>appointed<\/em> Todd Stroger to run in the General Election against Tony Peraica.\u00c2\u00a0 To Todd&#8217;s credit, at least he&#8217;s a politician.\u00c2\u00a0 To Todd&#8217;s detriment, he&#8217;s a Chicago Alderman.\u00c2\u00a0 Peraica ran a tough race and almost pulled off the impossible &#8211; a Republican Cook County Board President &#8211; for the first time <em>ever<\/em>.\u00c2\u00a0 Unfortunately, it wasn&#8217;t to be.\u00c2\u00a0 Result: Todd Stroger wins by roughly 55% to 45%.<\/p>\n<p>In other races, the sole Republican (center leaning) State Congressman, Elizabeth Coulson, of my district, won easily again against the Democratic challenger, whats-her-name.<\/p>\n<p>The Democratic sweep of the house gives us two opportunities: for those of us\u00c2\u00a0who are Goldwater conservatives and Reagan Republicans, it&#8217;s\u00c2\u00a0a perfect opportunity for our out-of-touch Republican\u00c2\u00a0leaders\u00c2\u00a0to get back to their constituents (us)\u00c2\u00a0and figure out what they are doing wrong.\u00c2\u00a0 For Democrats, it&#8217;s time to put their money where their mouths are, and fix things like Social Security, Homeland Security, Taxes, and Foreign Policy.<\/p>\n<p>I wish them both luck.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So did you vote?\u00c2\u00a0 I did.\u00c2\u00a0 Here&#8217;s a recap of what happened in my district. U.S. Congress: Jan Schakowski vs. Michael Shannon, 9th Congressional District I&#8217;m no big fan of Jan Schakowski.\u00c2\u00a0 She&#8217;s a fairly typical liberal tax-and-spend Democrat, and this is her perfect congressional district.\u00c2\u00a0 I was researching her opponent, because I hadn&#8217;t seen [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-99","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/famille.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/famille.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/famille.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/famille.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/famille.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=99"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/famille.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":984,"href":"http:\/\/famille.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99\/revisions\/984"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/famille.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=99"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/famille.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=99"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/famille.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=99"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}