Although I would say its perfectly fine to like some of what a historical figure said, and not other things. I’m a big fan of Teddy Roosevelt, but he was a bit of a racist. This being true doesn’t change the fact that he was a profoundly amazing, inspiring and forward looking president and human being. I’m sure I’d find more to disagree with him on if I looked closer at what he did when he was the governor of NY, VP, then President.

You, like many, are too quick and too certain with your predictions how the California electorate will vote under this system. For example, with an incompetent, unpopular and arrogant incumbent like Boxer – anything could happen in the primary. If we were using the prop 14 methodology, it is entirely possible that Boxer would already be a lame duck. She would likely have had a serious Democratic competitor, and one could easily envision Fiorina and Campbell being the top two vote getters in the primary.

I’m glad it passed. It is worth a shot.

As for the rest of my Cal vote – since we are still living under the boot heel of Single Party Democratic Rule, I remain a Republican and voted in the Republican primary. I voted for Chicks in Charge in California – Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina. Neither are professional pols, and perfectly capable of making major mistakes in the pressure cooker of a major campaign (Remember Carly saying neither Obama nor McCain were qualified to be a CEO of a Fortune 500 company? It’s true, but you don’t say thing like that in a campaign). Regardless, they are both smart, mean, good businesswomen, technically savvy, and tough as nails. Exactly what we need in this state.

With any luck, in the fall we’ll finally be rid of Boxer – who is an embarrassment to all of California, the Reps will take one or both houses, and I can re-register Democratic and get behind the re-election of Barack Obama in 2012 to maintain divided government. He’ll need all the help he can get.

Richard said in his note that my blog (The Hankster)’s imprimatur quote from George Washington’s farewell address, warning against the “baneful effects of party,” makes it seem that I think all elections should be nonpartisan.

That’s a misuse of the word imprimatur. And I tend to think that you overread Washington’s warning (he warned, after all, not of parties, nor even the effects of parties, but the baneful effects of parties), and that his warnings reflect assumptions that have been falsified by two centuries of experience. Nevertheless, while you presumably disagree, one must wonder about your consistency: If you are going to cite Washington’s farewell address as axiomatic, as you prepared to carry that to its logical conclusion and call for the immediate withdrawal of the United States from all international agreements and organizations, including the UN and NATO? That, after all, is the upshot of another remark in Washington’s farewell affress: Why, wondered he, should we “interweav[e] our destiny with that of any part of Europe, [and] entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor or caprice?” Thus, he counseled:

It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world; so far, I mean, as we are now at liberty to do it; for let me not be understood as capable of patronizing infidelity to existing engagements. I hold the maxim no less applicable to public than to private affairs, that honesty is always the best policy. I repeat it, therefore, let those engagements be observed in their genuine sense. But, in my opinion, it is unnecessary and would be unwise to extend them.

Taking care always to keep ourselves by suitable establishments on a respectable defensive posture, we may safely trust to temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies.

Cherrypicking is disreputable. Are you to be an isolationist, Nancy, or will you concede that simply regurgitating an out-of-context quote from Washington is not a freestanding argument?

I’m in favor of Prop 14 because it would give voting rights (i.e. full citizenship) to California’s 3.5 million registered independents … The disenfranchisement of independent voters is a civil rights issue and one that must be addressed here and now as the damage the parties and partisanship are causing to our government and to our country is alarming.

Vapid nonsense–and gratuitously insulting to those historical struggles fought to attain voting rights for real. The claim that independents are disenfranched by closed primaries (or that any person has any right whatsoever to participate in the selection of nominees for parties to which they don’t belong) is specious nonsense.

Expansion of democracy and revolution.

Two things that are fool’s errands, one harmful to any polity and the other to ours. What we need is consolidation of elected authority and closed primaries. Your worldview is novel and wrong, and your misidentification of those errors with American history is frankly offensive.