President Obama suggests making voting mandatory. A great idea that will never happen. Update!

Stop me if I'm being too logical.

Courtesy of CBS News:  

President Obama on Wednesday suggested that if U.S. voters want to counter the outsized influence of money in politics, it might be a good idea to adopt mandatory voting. 

"Other countries have mandatory voting," Mr. Obama said at a town hall-style event in Cleveland, Ohio, citing places like Australia. "It would be transformative if everybody voted -- that would counteract money more than anything." 

The president continued, "The people who tend not to vote are young, they're lower income, they're skewed more heavily toward immigrant groups and minorities... There's a reason why some folks try to keep them away from the polls." 

Get-out-the-vote efforts are a costly part of political campaigns, and yet voter turnout in the U.S. remains low -- in last year's midterm elections, the national turnout rate was just 36.3 percent. 

As Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus noted, there were 11 countries as of November 2014 that have mandatory voting rules, including Australia. Even though Australians can be fined for failing to vote (or even thrown in jail for failing to vote repeatedly), the law is popular.

Of course there are two big problems with implementing such a rule in America, one is our fetish for what we perceive to be free will, and the other is that if ALL voters voted the Republicans would never win another election, which means they would fight this with every fiber of heir being. 

In my opinion it is a fantastic idea.

After all we have to get our kids vaccinated, and put them into car seats to keep them safe, why shouldn't we have to vote to keep our democracy safe as well?

Update: As you may have guessed Fox News  and the Right Wing are having a meltdown over the idea of mandatory voting.

Look any idea that freaks the conservatives out this much I think is worth considering.

I found this on Reddit, with the caption "She's registered to vote...are you?"

I think that bottom word is "asshole" but I'm not sure if that is another insult directed at Obama, or if it is just a reminder as to where hers is located?

For the majority of Americans the Tea Party and the Republican party are now synonymous.

Courtesy of the Washington Post:  

Views of the Republican Party’s ideological leaning are essentially the same as the tea party. 

Forty percent say the tea party is too conservative — about the same number as say the Republican Party is too conservative (43 percent). While 36 percent of Americans say the views of the GOP are “about right,” 35 percent say the same of the tea party. 

Views of the GOP and the tea party are virtually the same across all demographics. Fifty-five percent of moderates say the GOP is too conservative, versus 52 percent who say the same of the tea party. 

In other words, if the tea party has moved the GOP to the right — and it has — it has done so to such an extent they are now viewed as ideologically very similar.

So while the establishment Republicans are locked in a pitched battle for control of their party with the Teabaggers, the rest of the country sees them as one and the same.

What was it the comic strip character Pogo once said? 

This is pretty good news for the progressives moving toward 2014. Now if only we can get that damn website up and running, and manage not to shoot ourselves in the foot, we might have a real shot at gaining some seats and getting this country back on track.