OK, here are a few:

1. I think a social safety net is a practical necessity. I also favor some labor laws such as the Wagner Act, FLSA, OSHA, etc., and some progresivity in the tax code. If the gap between rich and poor gets too large, that’s how people like Huey Long and Hugo Chavez get elected.

2. I’m not convinced that public schools, state universities, and student aid aren’t necessary. Libertarian rhetoric about separating school and state sounds good, but I’d have to see it work somewhere else before I’d be willing to try it here.

3. Government action to protect the environment has generally been beneficial. Our air and water are a lot cleaner than they were 35 years ago.

4. I favor public ownership of natural monopolies, or at least those natural monopolies that are already publicly owned, such as roads and water lines. I suppose you could argue that this position is self-serving, as I work for the Cleveland Division of Water.

5. Some restrictions on land use are necessary for environmental protection, to protect neighbors’ property values, and to prevent development from outpacing the ability of infrastructure to serve it.

Finally, I hate to be picky about capitalization, but it affects the meanings of common nouns that double as party labels. While I tend toward libertarianism, I’m not a Libertarian. Likewise, I’m a republican but not a Republican. Oddly enough, I’m a Democrat, but not much of a democrat.

If both houses of the Louisiana state legislature stay Democratic, that would make the analogy even better (state-wide offices and legislative majority of opposite parties). At the moment it appears that the Louisiana Senate will stay majority Democratic, but control of the House remains to be decided.

Only because I think that every single one of us has inside us some contradiction of some type – and I think those contradictions show us to be human.

Let me see your human side!

(No – that doesn’t mean I think Libertarians aren’t human.)

At the beginning of the 1990′s, Democrats controlled the redistricting process and held most of the U.S. House seats. By the end of the decade, Republicans had all but one of the state’s congressional seats.

Kentucky is quite tolerant of so-called “vice.” From 1911 to 1913 it was the only state that allowed wagering on horse races. Casino gaming was generally tolerated, though technically illegal, in Newport, Kentucky until the mid-1960′s when Campbell County elected some do-gooder sheriff. When I was growing up near Cincinnati, Ohioans would cross the river to go to strip clubs or to take advantage of Kentucky’s low taxes on alcohol and tobacco.

Perhaps there’s an analogy between the 2007 state-wide elections in Louisiana and the 2006 state-wide elections in Ohio? The party in power was seen as incompetent and/or corrupt and got its clock cleaned at the next election.