This is just rooting for your favorite team and it doesn't illuminate what policies work or don't work.
A better way would be to survey the cities of the world, measure crime and homelessness, and systematically identify the policies that consistently deliver better results.
What LA needs to do is setup cameras in those areas with license plate readers. Also LA has also always had a problem with illegal dumping. Maybe offer a tip line as well with cash rewards.
Cruise through the comments on this thread to see this "natural reflex" on display.
This is just rooting for your favorite team...
I can attest to this. Long time ago, I lived in Minneapolis for a while and thought the place got worked over by liberals. Now I live in small town Wisconsin, and we got bent over by conservatives so bad that we're a regular feature in the national news and the butt of late night comedy jokes.
I was foolish when I was younger, and thought the liberal-conservative thing made a difference in politicians. It doesn't. You can get reamed by either one. In fact, you're most likely to get reamed when you're thinking in terms of the liberal-conservative dichotomy.
At least, that's been my experience. Your mileage may vary I guess.
Guess which party was in favor of it, and which was against it. This happened recently, within your living memory.
Supposedly liberal California overturned the courts ruling on this issue with prop 8 in 2008.
I think Republicans, being conservatives, definitely took longer to move on this issue than Democrats, but I think this is an area where the country as a whole shifted a lot over the recent past.
What is funny (at least to me) though is the huge peak in activity on Grindr during republican conventions. To be fair, the republicans as a group are way better on nuclear power despite denying climate change.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/9aeen8/cleveland-was-bomb...
It's very clear that the modern Democratic party overall was in favor of legalizing gay marriage and that the modern Republican party overall was against it. And that, to this day, Democrats are still much better on LGBT issues than Republicans.
Once the tide turns (on almost any issue) both parties are pretty similar. It went that way with Civil Rights (when LBJ embraced it) and seems to be that way with gay issues today. Just this week President Trump tweeted a pro-gay message.
I think this one is over. There's not a big difference in what the parties are offering, as far as I can tell. It's not a big platform issue for either side.
Ye shall know them by their fruits: https://mobile.twitter.com/cmclymer/status/11345548023299153...
Make no mistake - LGBT rights are under direct attack by the Trump administration. We are likely to see major setbacks in the near future under the guise of “religious freedom.”
Take it from someone with a vested interest in the subject (I’m quite gay): this one isn’t over.
This one isn't over, unfortunately. Many Republican elected officials are still very hostile to LGBT rights, including continued pushes to discriminate against transgender people. Sexual orientation and gender identity are NOT protected classes in most states, and many Republicans are calling to protect discrimination against LGBT individuals under the guise of freedom of religion.
The gay people I know are very afraid of what today's Republicans are doing. It's simply not true that it's over.
Opposition to laws and policies that set boundaries on the behaviour of drug addicts, like anti-vagrancy laws and forced rebab, comes only from Democrats.
Empowering public sector unions that make public servants less accountable and government less effective is promoted primarily by Democrats.
The creation of clusters of social housing that creates crime-ridden neighbourhoods that perpetuate anti-social and lawless behaviour, as well as government dependency, is done exclusively by registered Democrats.
Look at major cities with severe trash/homelessness problems, and how many of them are run by Democrats. In the short-term, a lot of Democrat policies help the people they set out to help. In the long run, they create government dependency and ghettos, and that harms far more people.
If you want law and order, Republicans are the party to vote for. The longer this reality is denied for political correctness reasons, the stronger the populist right-wing political backlash will be when it comes.
On the other hand, there are many big cities where Democrats think they will never lose to Republicans, and in some cases (e.g. Chicago) they're right. So there is less of a check on their power.
So, the better comparison to Democrats running a big city, would be Republicans running a state where Democrats haven't won state-wide elections in a long time.
That's how Republican candidates can lose the popular vote yet win the electoral college. I see no sign of the Democrats playing catch-up for 2020 and I think they are in for a rude awakening despite our current leader's seemingly low numbers because that guy brings out his base.
Which, given the Democrats urban emphasis, means it is biased against them, not as an accident or via a loophole, but by original design. I don't know that the Republicans deserve a lot of credit for seeing this, it was no secret, it was the original stated intention of giving each state 2 senators, and making electoral college votes equal senators plus representatives.
One does have to ask, though, why the Democrats have resolutely refused to acknowledge that this is how the electoral college works, and pay more attention to winning in rural and small states.
Nailed it. I lost almost all respect for Hillary Clinton when she refused to campaign there whilst Trump, all of my dislike for him and his ideology aside, campaigned there and truly earned every vote he got. Doubly so when her own husband, all of his failings aside someone insanely great on the campaign trail himself, urged her to do so.