A Democrat I could vote for

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“I’ll be honest with you, I was a little naïve in 2000,” says Schweitzer. “The system’s changed since then. It’s gotten a lot worse. I found that being a member of Congress means your only job is to get re-elected. History will judge you by how many times you get re-elected, and you get re-elected by raising money. You raise it from insurance, from pharmaceutical, from big energy, and from the military-industrial complex.”

If Edward Snowden is a criminal, then so are a lot of people that are working within the CIA and the NSA who have been spying illegally on American citizens. They ought to grant Snowden clemency. Now, let me say this: Shame on us if we had a person working for a private contractor, without a high school diploma, who was in possession of our most delicate secrets. We look like Keystone Kops! But I don’t have any problem with the NSA and their mission of collecting information on foreign leaders. They spy on us; we spy on them. I’ve got a real big problem with American neighbors spying on American neighbors.

The Iranian deal makes sense. We linked up with the Saudis before and after World War II. Look, unlike virtually every member of Congress, I have a pretty good firsthand knowledge of the Middle East. The day after I got out of graduate school, after I defended my thesis, I went straight to Libya. I was there for a year; I was in Saudi Arabia for seven. I learned to speak Arabic. I can explain to you, in a way that almost no one else in the country can, the difference between a Sunni and a Shia. I can explain to you who and what the Wahhabis are in Saudi Arabia. I can talk to you about why we, the United States, initially got involved with the Saudi royal family, what we got out of the deal. I can explain to you why we knew Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. We knew, because we supplied chemical weapons to him so he could poison the Iranians. The Iranians are Persian, not Arab; they haven’t got along for several thousand years.

So we’ve had a bad history with Iran because of what we did in 1953, replacing an elected official with a dictator. If we can build a relationship that’s a little more even-handed, if we can get them to back away from their nuclear ambition—let’s face it, their neighbors don’t even like that—if we were to step up and said we’re no longer just going to take the Saudis’ position all the time, you don’t have to worry about us attacking you from Afghanistan or Iraq, if you agree to back away from your nuclear ambitions, we’ll be neutral.

Well, here’s what I can say. Each society has to make choices about what’s against the law. You have a large percentage of the population that’s already using this. The war on drugs is another war that appears to have been lost. This experiment with prohibition of marijuana doesn’t seem have to been working. Colorado might have it more right than the rest of us.

I will give you not just how this thing should have been written, but what it will get to be, because what we have right now will not work. No. 1: You pass national health insurance laws that say you can’t discriminate against women, charge them higher premiums than men of the same age, you can’t discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions, you can’t have annual caps. Then you allow insurance companies to compete wherever they want, in any state. Boom. The second thing is, you say to every citizen in the United States, now you have the option to buy into Medicare.

We just need to act like capitalists, not socialists. We need to negotiate to buy medicine. Now, what’s interesting is that the detractors hear that and say—this is like socialized medicine. No! Are you kidding me? France, the United Kingdom: They negotiate like capitalists to buy their medicine. The United States? We say to the pharmaceutical companies, how much would you like this for? We continue to pay them three times what they sell the same medicines for all over the world. Right after the bill was passed, big pharma was running ads for all the Democrats who voted for this thing. Even in Montana. What’d they get out of it? They now have a lot more money.

Schweitzer is big on socialized medicine, he's misrepresenting his position.

Schweitzer is big on socialized medicine, he's misrepresenting his position. He's pretty solid a lot of other issues tho, was opposed to REAL ID too. If the Dems were smart he'd be their candidate in 2016 but I think they're going the Hilary direction.

I hope he runs, cause Hillary isn't an option for me, I don't see anyone on the Republican side that looks too promising, and as much as I'd like to see a Gary Johnson presidency, I don't see that happening absent something apocalyptic befalling the current political system.

The problem is that a Democrat in the Senate will vote with their fellow Democrats on almost every important issue except gun control (and, even then, none other then Joe Manchin was leading the charge). Mark Begich voted for Obamacare. So, regardless of how many issues the candidate gets right, if he has a D next to his name, don't send him to the Senate.

Absolutely, even the supposedly principled Dennis Kucinich was swayed to vote for Obamacare after he let him have a ride on Air Force One.