First Senator Obama defeated Senator McCain. Then he defeated Governor Romney. Now he's up against his third Republian--this time not a candidate but the heretofore Boss of the Republican Party: Grover Norquist.
On Norquist's side you have the Tea Party contingent in Congress, pretty much all the right wing radio and TV hosts, mong blogosphere, a majority of the Republican rank and file in the congressional districts that sent those Tea Party types to Congress.
On the President's side you have the Republican congressmen in districts that might elect a Democrat if their Congressman keeps putting the desires of billionaires before their own, and the Republican leadership, which knows the President has the Republicans over a barrell.
But the word from Norquist's radio and TV pundits is that the Republicans actually have the Presideand that they can put the President on a short leash with month to month or even week to week spending approvals contingent on the President obeying them.
For the sake of both moderate conservatives and everyone else, I hope Norquist's troops stick to their guns. It will be painful for the country, but it will be even more painful to allow Norquist to continue to run America's economics from an unelected lobbyists's office.
The Republican leadership may actually hope this happens too, because the Tea Party types are so irrational they're starting to tarnish the Reputlican brand, and the party's leadership would be happier with congressmen who don't have Crazy Eyes.
Wednesday, November 28, 2012
Judging religions from a public policy angle
I wrote the following entry for a thread on Amazon.com's Relgion forum:
Religion is a cognitive framework overlaying universal human tribality. Its validity isn't in its theology but in how well it maps to those universal human needs and to current exigencies.
I'm a lot less interested in each faith's doctinal particulars than in how its adherents behave.
"By their works ye shall know them."
For example, Mormon prayer is supposed to have you asking God for advice, not for special favors. And not even advice per se. In your prayer you tell God of something you're dealing with--along with what you propose to do about it. It you put in that work, then God, hopefully, will give you a wordless feeling as to whether you're barking up the right tree or if you need to go back to the drawing board, then ask God again when you have a new proposal.
Now even though I don't believe in any God, I find this approach to prayer kind of ideal--it encourages personal initiative and resonsibility. Which is good for society.
I notice most of the religious people in Amazon's Religion forum seem to focus on doctrine to the exclusion of actual practice, and the atheists and empiricists to critique different doctrines.
So let me encourage both sides to talk more about doctrine insofar as it shows up in pracitce. Because your doctrine is your own business, but your practice impinges on the rest of us.
Religion is a cognitive framework overlaying universal human tribality. Its validity isn't in its theology but in how well it maps to those universal human needs and to current exigencies.
I'm a lot less interested in each faith's doctinal particulars than in how its adherents behave.
"By their works ye shall know them."
For example, Mormon prayer is supposed to have you asking God for advice, not for special favors. And not even advice per se. In your prayer you tell God of something you're dealing with--along with what you propose to do about it. It you put in that work, then God, hopefully, will give you a wordless feeling as to whether you're barking up the right tree or if you need to go back to the drawing board, then ask God again when you have a new proposal.
Now even though I don't believe in any God, I find this approach to prayer kind of ideal--it encourages personal initiative and resonsibility. Which is good for society.
I notice most of the religious people in Amazon's Religion forum seem to focus on doctrine to the exclusion of actual practice, and the atheists and empiricists to critique different doctrines.
So let me encourage both sides to talk more about doctrine insofar as it shows up in pracitce. Because your doctrine is your own business, but your practice impinges on the rest of us.
Sunday, November 25, 2012
How the GOP may win the 2016 election
Ohio went for Obama. But if its Electoral College contingent had been determined by congressional district, a majority of electors would have gone for Romney; and if the other battleground states with Republican-contolled state governments do the same thing, the GOP can probably win.
The trick is gerrymandering. Ohio's districts are designed to put Democratic minorities into as many districts as possible, making Ohio Republican congressmen strongly disproportionate to the actual number of Republicans in the state.
This would not be the case if Ohio had nonpartisan redistricting, but that's not how either party rolls. California got nonpartisan redistricting over the opposition of both major parties, via ballot initiative.
Ohio Republicans are already working on this idea.
Could Democratically-controlled states do the same? Sure, except for ones like California that have banned gerrymandering.
And of course Republicans wouldn't dream of adopting congressional district Elector assignment in states where a majority of voters.
What we need is nonpartisan redistricting in every state and then electors apportioned by the vote within each state in some way--congressional district apportionment could work IF the districts weren't gerrymandered.
But doing this piecemeal only in states where it would give Republican an advantage is not just immoral--it wipes out any justification for doing this apart from sheer tribalism.
It increases the sense of The Enemy not being America's enemies but your party's opponents. Pity one of major parties pursues this notion in so many ways.
The trick is gerrymandering. Ohio's districts are designed to put Democratic minorities into as many districts as possible, making Ohio Republican congressmen strongly disproportionate to the actual number of Republicans in the state.
This would not be the case if Ohio had nonpartisan redistricting, but that's not how either party rolls. California got nonpartisan redistricting over the opposition of both major parties, via ballot initiative.
Ohio Republicans are already working on this idea.
Could Democratically-controlled states do the same? Sure, except for ones like California that have banned gerrymandering.
And of course Republicans wouldn't dream of adopting congressional district Elector assignment in states where a majority of voters.
What we need is nonpartisan redistricting in every state and then electors apportioned by the vote within each state in some way--congressional district apportionment could work IF the districts weren't gerrymandered.
But doing this piecemeal only in states where it would give Republican an advantage is not just immoral--it wipes out any justification for doing this apart from sheer tribalism.
It increases the sense of The Enemy not being America's enemies but your party's opponents. Pity one of major parties pursues this notion in so many ways.
It's about the infrastructure, stupid
Our country once had the world's leading
infrastructure, thanks to Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Now we
drive over pitted roadways and collapsing bridges and rickety railroad tracks
that won't support fast trains, forcing goods to travel via truck when that's
much less cost-effective and much more polluting. Our electrical grid is one
good solar mass ejection from collapsing in a heap, we don't have a national
cellphone standard and our broadband support is the worst among all rich
countries.
Yet when Democrats say we have to invest in our infrastructure so our businesses can keep up with the rest of the world, and it has to be done by government to avoid piecemeal balkanization of all these things, all Republicans hear is
socialismsocialismsocialismsocialismsocialsimsocialismsocialism
...and their brains freeze like an epileptic's on seeing strobe lights flashing.
They're so far over the edge that they can't face the fact that no, they didn't "build it." They used it, like everyone else uses "it." They didn't build the roads and power grids and bridges and dams and everything else a civilization needs.
Do they want us to go back to homesteading like farmers in Little House on the Prarie?
How did the Republicans walk away from conservatism and become something very close to anarchists?
Yet when Democrats say we have to invest in our infrastructure so our businesses can keep up with the rest of the world, and it has to be done by government to avoid piecemeal balkanization of all these things, all Republicans hear is
socialismsocialismsocialismsocialismsocialsimsocialismsocialism
...and their brains freeze like an epileptic's on seeing strobe lights flashing.
They're so far over the edge that they can't face the fact that no, they didn't "build it." They used it, like everyone else uses "it." They didn't build the roads and power grids and bridges and dams and everything else a civilization needs.
Do they want us to go back to homesteading like farmers in Little House on the Prarie?
How did the Republicans walk away from conservatism and become something very close to anarchists?
Saturday, November 24, 2012
Are we still in a recession?
If you're unemployed I think it's a recession. If I'm unemployed I think it's a depression.
In a consumption-based society hiring stems from sales which stem from income. The middle class's income went south starting all the way back in the 1970s and hasn't increased much if any on the average since then, while unskilled wages have declined, while the top 1% used the Reagan tax / regulation restructuring to siphon more and more of the 99%'s income into their pockets.
Problem is, rich people don't spend remotely as much of their income as the rest do, so the more that income is sequestered in the 1%'s offshore bank accounts, the more the economy is starved.
This was masked by two things: a housing bubble starting then and the availability of cheap goods from abroad. The housing bubble meant that Americans could compensate for their declining purchasing power by tapping their home equity. And cheap foreign goods helped in making people feel like they still have purchasing power, but it moved innumerable jobs offshore so people laid off due to offshored jobs mostly only found re-employment at much lower wages.
Now the housing bubble has popped, Americans' home equity is long gone, and their crappy jobs don't give them much discretionary income.
So there's no basis for the economy to really recover unless and until we can tackle the problem of America having the income inequality of a banana republic and Americans having the purchasing power of poor people instead of middle class people.
Neither of those problems are going to be solved quickly if ever, so we'll stay bumping along with an anemic recovery.
And Republicans who have fed on--and loved--the GOP Ministry of Propaganda's rat poison absolutely believe that their problems stem from their fellow victims and that their saviors are the parasites who put America in the hole in the first place.
A small majority of Americans realize that the tasty stuff the GOP's been feeding them is indeed rat poison...but it's so darn tasty, like good rat poison is.
That's why I thought America would lose in this last election. We really dodged a bullet, getting a moderate Republican instead of Grover Norquist's sock puppet.
In a consumption-based society hiring stems from sales which stem from income. The middle class's income went south starting all the way back in the 1970s and hasn't increased much if any on the average since then, while unskilled wages have declined, while the top 1% used the Reagan tax / regulation restructuring to siphon more and more of the 99%'s income into their pockets.
Problem is, rich people don't spend remotely as much of their income as the rest do, so the more that income is sequestered in the 1%'s offshore bank accounts, the more the economy is starved.
This was masked by two things: a housing bubble starting then and the availability of cheap goods from abroad. The housing bubble meant that Americans could compensate for their declining purchasing power by tapping their home equity. And cheap foreign goods helped in making people feel like they still have purchasing power, but it moved innumerable jobs offshore so people laid off due to offshored jobs mostly only found re-employment at much lower wages.
Now the housing bubble has popped, Americans' home equity is long gone, and their crappy jobs don't give them much discretionary income.
So there's no basis for the economy to really recover unless and until we can tackle the problem of America having the income inequality of a banana republic and Americans having the purchasing power of poor people instead of middle class people.
Neither of those problems are going to be solved quickly if ever, so we'll stay bumping along with an anemic recovery.
And Republicans who have fed on--and loved--the GOP Ministry of Propaganda's rat poison absolutely believe that their problems stem from their fellow victims and that their saviors are the parasites who put America in the hole in the first place.
A small majority of Americans realize that the tasty stuff the GOP's been feeding them is indeed rat poison...but it's so darn tasty, like good rat poison is.
That's why I thought America would lose in this last election. We really dodged a bullet, getting a moderate Republican instead of Grover Norquist's sock puppet.
Thursday, November 22, 2012
Filibuster reform should happen the first day the Senate reconvenes
Today the United States Senate operates more under the U.S. government's Articles of Confederation than under the Constitution.
The Articles of Confederation had required a 2/3 majority to pass anything. It didn't work. The Founders knew better, which is why the Constitution says everything the Senate does only requires a 51 vote majority except for treaties, impeachment, veto overrides, Constitutional amendments, & expulsion of members.
The current filibuster rules enable the minority power to control the Senate--and even one Senator to hold up bills and appointments as long as they please.
Instead of being a rare event, the Republican Party now uses filibustering darn near everything not as a tool to exercise minority rights but as a tool to make the majority government a failure, in hopes of the minority party regaining power.
This is a betrayal of the people--putting Party before Country. The GOPs actions have crippled a crucial part of government and turned America's government from a Constitutional Republic back into a Confederacy.
The majority party needs to do what it's talking about and rein in the abuse of Senate rules that centers on the filibuster.
The current rules violate the spirit of the Constitution and the intentions of the Founders. Anyone who opposes filibuster reform should be able to demonstrate why their opposition doesn't show a willingness to harm the Republic for partisan ends.
-------------------------------------------------------------
[Requiring more than a majority is] a poison [that] destroy[s] the energy of the government, and substitute[s] the pleasure, caprice, or artifices of an insignificant, turbulent, or corrupt junto to the regular deliberations and decisions of a respectable majority. In those emergencies of a nation, in which …the weakness or strength of its government is of the greatest importance, there is commonly a necessity for action. If…the majority, in order that something may be done, must conform to the views of the minority… the sense of the smaller number will overrule that of the greater…. Hence, tedious delays; continual negotiation and intrigue; contemptible compromises of the public good.
Alexander Hamilton, Federalist Papers Number 22
For more details, you can read a nonpartisan analysis of the Senate filibuster here.
The Articles of Confederation had required a 2/3 majority to pass anything. It didn't work. The Founders knew better, which is why the Constitution says everything the Senate does only requires a 51 vote majority except for treaties, impeachment, veto overrides, Constitutional amendments, & expulsion of members.
The current filibuster rules enable the minority power to control the Senate--and even one Senator to hold up bills and appointments as long as they please.
Instead of being a rare event, the Republican Party now uses filibustering darn near everything not as a tool to exercise minority rights but as a tool to make the majority government a failure, in hopes of the minority party regaining power.
This is a betrayal of the people--putting Party before Country. The GOPs actions have crippled a crucial part of government and turned America's government from a Constitutional Republic back into a Confederacy.
The majority party needs to do what it's talking about and rein in the abuse of Senate rules that centers on the filibuster.
The current rules violate the spirit of the Constitution and the intentions of the Founders. Anyone who opposes filibuster reform should be able to demonstrate why their opposition doesn't show a willingness to harm the Republic for partisan ends.
-------------------------------------------------------------
[Requiring more than a majority is] a poison [that] destroy[s] the energy of the government, and substitute[s] the pleasure, caprice, or artifices of an insignificant, turbulent, or corrupt junto to the regular deliberations and decisions of a respectable majority. In those emergencies of a nation, in which …the weakness or strength of its government is of the greatest importance, there is commonly a necessity for action. If…the majority, in order that something may be done, must conform to the views of the minority… the sense of the smaller number will overrule that of the greater…. Hence, tedious delays; continual negotiation and intrigue; contemptible compromises of the public good.
Alexander Hamilton, Federalist Papers Number 22
For more details, you can read a nonpartisan analysis of the Senate filibuster here.
Saturday, November 17, 2012
Socialism = Corporatism
Hardcore Republicans talk about freedom a lot. By which they mean "keeping the government off our backs"--smaller government, fewer laws and regulations.
I love the unspoken assumptions holding up this leitmotif of the GOP.
1. That people in power via government position are almost certain to abuse that power, as epitomized by the Soviet Union.
2. That people in power via personal wealth and/or corporate position are almost certain to not abuse that power. That the gray, grim existence of workers in 19th century England--the existence that inspired Karl Marx to invent Communism--is fiction. That Charles Dickens' novels are pure fantasy.
So instead of "power corrupts" we have the GOP's revision: "power corrupts but only if it's government power."
3. That all Democrats (who are mostly blacks & Mexicans) want to avoid work but instead live off welfare from an all-ecompassing Nanny State funded exclusively by Republicans, all of whom are hard-working, self-sufficient, middle-age white men and their wives (remember, I said these were unspoken assumptions).
4. That your continued employment is uncertain, and no matter how hard you work, you're only employed at the whim of the Gods Among Men known as the Job Creators. These Gods are scary gods who must be placated with offerings, not enraged by regulations. If we try to regulate them they'll be angered, and they they'll just give your job to someone in China.
5. So you must both love and fear America's bosses and billionaires, as you would love and fear a stern, judgmental, demanding father--emotionally remote but the source of all earthly blessings at the same time.
6. That the only alternative to stifling, bureaucracy-gone-wild, forcing you to spend every day filling out forms, government agents everywhere throwing sand in the gears of Industry regulation is no regulation at all. This sounds like an extreme interpretation of Republican positions, and of course they'd repudiate this extremist position if asked. But that's the beauty of saying things that imply assumptions instead of stating them.
Meaning that you can't verify this point by asking Republicans. You can verify it from observing Republican behavior. Ask yourself how often you've heard Republicans speak in praise of particular government regulations vs. how often you've heard them angrily denouncing both particular regulations and the overall concept of government regulation.
The best way to figure out what someone means is to infer it from their behavior, not their claims per se. "By his works ye shall know him."
------------------------------
Here Republicans mix & match several rhetorical fallacies--Appeal to Authority, the Straw Man Argument, Emotional Appeal, and of course using unspoken assumptions which can't stand up to scrutiny but which are emotionally appealing.
The notion that government run wild endangers personal freedoms was proven abundantly by the Soviet Union's example, to mention just one. But the notion that unregulated business also endangers personal freedom has also been provent abundantly, and Dickens' England is again just one example.
And the notion that people with some kinds of power abuse it if they aren't checked, while people with other kinds of power don't is deeply ridiculous.
That the GOP advocates such a belief is by itself proof that this party serves its rich patrons first and foremost--what the rank & file want only gets noticed by the Party bosses if it doesn't cost those patrons anything beyond pocket change (for them), or if it's so important to the rank and file that the Party bosses can't get re-elected if they ignore it.
The Democrats also trade in unspoken assumptions. This fact doesn't let the GOP off the hook--and vice-versa.
I love the unspoken assumptions holding up this leitmotif of the GOP.
1. That people in power via government position are almost certain to abuse that power, as epitomized by the Soviet Union.
2. That people in power via personal wealth and/or corporate position are almost certain to not abuse that power. That the gray, grim existence of workers in 19th century England--the existence that inspired Karl Marx to invent Communism--is fiction. That Charles Dickens' novels are pure fantasy.
So instead of "power corrupts" we have the GOP's revision: "power corrupts but only if it's government power."
3. That all Democrats (who are mostly blacks & Mexicans) want to avoid work but instead live off welfare from an all-ecompassing Nanny State funded exclusively by Republicans, all of whom are hard-working, self-sufficient, middle-age white men and their wives (remember, I said these were unspoken assumptions).
4. That your continued employment is uncertain, and no matter how hard you work, you're only employed at the whim of the Gods Among Men known as the Job Creators. These Gods are scary gods who must be placated with offerings, not enraged by regulations. If we try to regulate them they'll be angered, and they they'll just give your job to someone in China.
5. So you must both love and fear America's bosses and billionaires, as you would love and fear a stern, judgmental, demanding father--emotionally remote but the source of all earthly blessings at the same time.
6. That the only alternative to stifling, bureaucracy-gone-wild, forcing you to spend every day filling out forms, government agents everywhere throwing sand in the gears of Industry regulation is no regulation at all. This sounds like an extreme interpretation of Republican positions, and of course they'd repudiate this extremist position if asked. But that's the beauty of saying things that imply assumptions instead of stating them.
Meaning that you can't verify this point by asking Republicans. You can verify it from observing Republican behavior. Ask yourself how often you've heard Republicans speak in praise of particular government regulations vs. how often you've heard them angrily denouncing both particular regulations and the overall concept of government regulation.
The best way to figure out what someone means is to infer it from their behavior, not their claims per se. "By his works ye shall know him."
------------------------------
Here Republicans mix & match several rhetorical fallacies--Appeal to Authority, the Straw Man Argument, Emotional Appeal, and of course using unspoken assumptions which can't stand up to scrutiny but which are emotionally appealing.
The notion that government run wild endangers personal freedoms was proven abundantly by the Soviet Union's example, to mention just one. But the notion that unregulated business also endangers personal freedom has also been provent abundantly, and Dickens' England is again just one example.
And the notion that people with some kinds of power abuse it if they aren't checked, while people with other kinds of power don't is deeply ridiculous.
That the GOP advocates such a belief is by itself proof that this party serves its rich patrons first and foremost--what the rank & file want only gets noticed by the Party bosses if it doesn't cost those patrons anything beyond pocket change (for them), or if it's so important to the rank and file that the Party bosses can't get re-elected if they ignore it.
The Democrats also trade in unspoken assumptions. This fact doesn't let the GOP off the hook--and vice-versa.
Friday, November 16, 2012
Millions of Republicans believe President Obama is not a Christian
Here is a note I wrote to a conservative who repeated the assertion that the President is no Christian, the proof being that notorious video clip of Reverend Wright cursing America. His initials are AB.
------------------------
re: Obama's church
AB, I know some Mormons who agree with you, saying President Obama is not a Christian, and a sizeable number of fellow Republicans agree with my Mormon friends...and you.
In my friends' case, I find this a little ironic, since a majority of American fundamentalists believe Mormons aren't Christians.
I was raised Episcopalian myself, which is like being a Protestant in Catholic clothes. So, having attended Episcopalian churches for a dozen years and Mormon wards for 28 years, that's 40 years of religious instruction by churches that all relied on the King James Bible. So even though I'm not Christian myself, God knows I know an awful lot about Christianity.
I also know a lot about American history, including understanding that President Obama's pastor, Reverend Wright, grew up in a different America than the one I grew up in (and the one President Obama grew up in), even though I'm old.
In Reverend Wrightt's America, most American citizens who looked like him weren't allowed to vote--and would very likely be murdered if they tried. Where they couldn't sit where they pleased on a bus. Where they couldn't drink from a any public water fountain or use any public bathroom. Where judges addressed black defendants by their first names--not Mr. or Mrs.--and cops and even store clerks addressed folks like Reverend Wright as "Boy" even if they were doctors in their 40s. Where if a black man was walking along a sidewalk and a white person was coming the other way, the black man would step off the curb into the gutter and stand there, cap in hand, head down, eyes down, until the white person had passed by. It was an America where black defendants were treated as guilty unless proven innocent--and the prisons were stuffed with black men, some with good reason, others not.
Listen to Billie Holliday's "Strange Fruit" for a flavor of that America.
In other words, blacks in Reverend Wright's generation weren't treated as American citizens. Yet they didn't belong anywhere else either. Least of all in Africa.
Enter young Barry Obama, raised his whole life in surroundings where he was pretty much the only black person. As a teenager, culturally he was no blacker than I am. His first immersion in black American culture came when he moved to Chicago to work as a community organizer after his college education.
America had treated young Barry Obama very well. So he had no reason to hate his country from his personal experience. But he had gone to a lot of effort to try to understand the black American culture most people he met assumed he was part of. He learned to be a Black American from his community, his wife, and his church.
I know it's un-Christian to curse at the people who'd oppressed you, and by the time young Barry Obama arrived in Chicago the days of Jim Crow were officially long gone. Of course the white Southern power elite was still up to its old tricks, and is to this very day, but not in Chicago. So for Barry Obama Reverend Wright was an anachronism, but also something of a spirit guide into the Black American experiencethat he was completly missing.
And just because the only thing you've seen Reverend Wright say was his one minute of damnng America, it's not like that's what he was saying every Sunday. Your experience of Reverend Wright was edited and framed by the Republican Party's Ministry of Propaganda.
Now of course no pastor of mine ever talked like that. Instead I give you Father D'Amico, the Episcopalian priest of the church we attended in Los Angeles at the time of the Freedom Bus Ride riots. He was an amicable, perpetually smiling paster beloved of all the little old ladies at church. His reaction to the Freedom Bus riots was to tell us that we didn't have to worry about it because there were no blacks in our parish.
But there was no YouTube then, and probably no one remembers Father D'Amico besides me. But I do. And what he said appalled me. It seemed utterly contrary to the teachings of Jesus.
So which was worse--Reverend Wright's unChristian rage at real oppression, or Father D'Amico's preaching indifference to the suffering of others (as long as the others were black at least)?
I would guess that Barry Obama was distressed by his pastor's thundering about past wrongs in a racist America that was foreign to his own American life. But I'd also guess that he was reluctant to judge the good Rev, since his studies had taught him that the Rev's rage was based on a very real, very ugly stain on America's history.
Virtually the only racism I've experienced personally was by blacks against whites. I am not preaching perpetual white guilt over our country's racist past. I feel zero guilt personally, since I've never discriminated against anyone for their race or ethnicity myself. If it were up to me our laws and enforcement should be race-blind as much as possible, with affirmative action for the econnomically deprived, not for members of some race/ethnicity or other.
That said, I will say that if Reverend Wright isn't a Christian--then neither was Father D'Amico. I judge President Obama's Christianity by two measures:
(1) Does he say he's a Christian? If so--and he does--I'll take him at face value barring contrary evidence about his behavior--not the behavior of a past pastor;
(2) Does he appear to apply Christian principles in his life? He certainly does in his family life. And I believe he does in the public sphere as well. But I'm not about setting myself up as the judge of someone else's religiosity unless their behavior blatantly transgresses the standards of their religion (or if they do what their religion tells them to do but their religion itself is evil, as is the Fundamentalist LDS church, for example).
------------------------
re: Obama's church
AB, I know some Mormons who agree with you, saying President Obama is not a Christian, and a sizeable number of fellow Republicans agree with my Mormon friends...and you.
In my friends' case, I find this a little ironic, since a majority of American fundamentalists believe Mormons aren't Christians.
I was raised Episcopalian myself, which is like being a Protestant in Catholic clothes. So, having attended Episcopalian churches for a dozen years and Mormon wards for 28 years, that's 40 years of religious instruction by churches that all relied on the King James Bible. So even though I'm not Christian myself, God knows I know an awful lot about Christianity.
I also know a lot about American history, including understanding that President Obama's pastor, Reverend Wright, grew up in a different America than the one I grew up in (and the one President Obama grew up in), even though I'm old.
In Reverend Wrightt's America, most American citizens who looked like him weren't allowed to vote--and would very likely be murdered if they tried. Where they couldn't sit where they pleased on a bus. Where they couldn't drink from a any public water fountain or use any public bathroom. Where judges addressed black defendants by their first names--not Mr. or Mrs.--and cops and even store clerks addressed folks like Reverend Wright as "Boy" even if they were doctors in their 40s. Where if a black man was walking along a sidewalk and a white person was coming the other way, the black man would step off the curb into the gutter and stand there, cap in hand, head down, eyes down, until the white person had passed by. It was an America where black defendants were treated as guilty unless proven innocent--and the prisons were stuffed with black men, some with good reason, others not.
Listen to Billie Holliday's "Strange Fruit" for a flavor of that America.
In other words, blacks in Reverend Wright's generation weren't treated as American citizens. Yet they didn't belong anywhere else either. Least of all in Africa.
Enter young Barry Obama, raised his whole life in surroundings where he was pretty much the only black person. As a teenager, culturally he was no blacker than I am. His first immersion in black American culture came when he moved to Chicago to work as a community organizer after his college education.
America had treated young Barry Obama very well. So he had no reason to hate his country from his personal experience. But he had gone to a lot of effort to try to understand the black American culture most people he met assumed he was part of. He learned to be a Black American from his community, his wife, and his church.
I know it's un-Christian to curse at the people who'd oppressed you, and by the time young Barry Obama arrived in Chicago the days of Jim Crow were officially long gone. Of course the white Southern power elite was still up to its old tricks, and is to this very day, but not in Chicago. So for Barry Obama Reverend Wright was an anachronism, but also something of a spirit guide into the Black American experiencethat he was completly missing.
And just because the only thing you've seen Reverend Wright say was his one minute of damnng America, it's not like that's what he was saying every Sunday. Your experience of Reverend Wright was edited and framed by the Republican Party's Ministry of Propaganda.
Now of course no pastor of mine ever talked like that. Instead I give you Father D'Amico, the Episcopalian priest of the church we attended in Los Angeles at the time of the Freedom Bus Ride riots. He was an amicable, perpetually smiling paster beloved of all the little old ladies at church. His reaction to the Freedom Bus riots was to tell us that we didn't have to worry about it because there were no blacks in our parish.
But there was no YouTube then, and probably no one remembers Father D'Amico besides me. But I do. And what he said appalled me. It seemed utterly contrary to the teachings of Jesus.
So which was worse--Reverend Wright's unChristian rage at real oppression, or Father D'Amico's preaching indifference to the suffering of others (as long as the others were black at least)?
I would guess that Barry Obama was distressed by his pastor's thundering about past wrongs in a racist America that was foreign to his own American life. But I'd also guess that he was reluctant to judge the good Rev, since his studies had taught him that the Rev's rage was based on a very real, very ugly stain on America's history.
Virtually the only racism I've experienced personally was by blacks against whites. I am not preaching perpetual white guilt over our country's racist past. I feel zero guilt personally, since I've never discriminated against anyone for their race or ethnicity myself. If it were up to me our laws and enforcement should be race-blind as much as possible, with affirmative action for the econnomically deprived, not for members of some race/ethnicity or other.
That said, I will say that if Reverend Wright isn't a Christian--then neither was Father D'Amico. I judge President Obama's Christianity by two measures:
(1) Does he say he's a Christian? If so--and he does--I'll take him at face value barring contrary evidence about his behavior--not the behavior of a past pastor;
(2) Does he appear to apply Christian principles in his life? He certainly does in his family life. And I believe he does in the public sphere as well. But I'm not about setting myself up as the judge of someone else's religiosity unless their behavior blatantly transgresses the standards of their religion (or if they do what their religion tells them to do but their religion itself is evil, as is the Fundamentalist LDS church, for example).
Thursday, November 15, 2012
The Meaning of the Benghazi tragedy
Fox TV News has gone All Benghazi All Day for the last week. Congressional Republicans are implying that this is worse than Watergate (since no one died in Watergate), and further implying that the President should resign over it.
Of course embassies and consulates and American foreign service personnel have been attacked and murdered under every president. Big world, lots of bad guys, foreign service can be a hazardous occupation, and we can have a company of Army rangers marching behind every foreign service staffer in dangerous areas.
I shouldn't have to prove this. Anyone who's followed the news generally for the last few decades will know this is true.
So with that in mind, here's the meaning of Benghazi:
The Republican Party's leadership has, for the past several decades, discarded one of the cornerstones of any democracy: abiding by the results of an election.
They impeached President Clinton for offenses that were not impeachable offenses. When Obama won in 2008, they vowed to make defeating him in 2012 their first order of business--not doing the People's business, but instead making the Party's business their job--at taxpayer expense of course.
And now they're challenging the results of this election in every way they can. Romney claiming Obama bought the votes (where's the vaunted Republican Grownup principle of not making excuses and taking your lumps?). Senator McCain proving he was never presidential material with his jihad over Benghazi. Accusation by Party leader Karl Rover of Democrats carrying out voter suppression--how's that for irony?
They don't have to like Obama having won. I sure wouldn't have liked it if Romney has won--especially since he has now proven that he has nothing but contempt for nearly half the country, showing exactly the attitude of entitlement that out of touch plutocrats are said to have in the popular stereotype. Well, the stereotype is there for a reason--some plutocrats really do think that way, and Romney's one of them.
The fact that so many Republican poo-bahs were blindsided by Obama winning shows the greatest danger of being a con artist: you can start to believe your own con. To accept that Obama won fair and square, beyond any local issues at the polls being able to change it, would require also accepting that they are out of touch with reality.
I'm not expecting them to adopt a liberal philosophy. But I am expecting them to say things based on evidence, not just wishful thinking--or mind-obliterating animosity. What sane person would want to entrust the Presidency to someone who didn't know the facts on the ground of this country--whether his political philosophy agreed with yours or not?
Bottom line is we have one of the two parties that won't accept election results except when it wins.
That is profoundly unpatriotic.
Of course embassies and consulates and American foreign service personnel have been attacked and murdered under every president. Big world, lots of bad guys, foreign service can be a hazardous occupation, and we can have a company of Army rangers marching behind every foreign service staffer in dangerous areas.
I shouldn't have to prove this. Anyone who's followed the news generally for the last few decades will know this is true.
So with that in mind, here's the meaning of Benghazi:
The Republican Party's leadership has, for the past several decades, discarded one of the cornerstones of any democracy: abiding by the results of an election.
They impeached President Clinton for offenses that were not impeachable offenses. When Obama won in 2008, they vowed to make defeating him in 2012 their first order of business--not doing the People's business, but instead making the Party's business their job--at taxpayer expense of course.
And now they're challenging the results of this election in every way they can. Romney claiming Obama bought the votes (where's the vaunted Republican Grownup principle of not making excuses and taking your lumps?). Senator McCain proving he was never presidential material with his jihad over Benghazi. Accusation by Party leader Karl Rover of Democrats carrying out voter suppression--how's that for irony?
They don't have to like Obama having won. I sure wouldn't have liked it if Romney has won--especially since he has now proven that he has nothing but contempt for nearly half the country, showing exactly the attitude of entitlement that out of touch plutocrats are said to have in the popular stereotype. Well, the stereotype is there for a reason--some plutocrats really do think that way, and Romney's one of them.
The fact that so many Republican poo-bahs were blindsided by Obama winning shows the greatest danger of being a con artist: you can start to believe your own con. To accept that Obama won fair and square, beyond any local issues at the polls being able to change it, would require also accepting that they are out of touch with reality.
I'm not expecting them to adopt a liberal philosophy. But I am expecting them to say things based on evidence, not just wishful thinking--or mind-obliterating animosity. What sane person would want to entrust the Presidency to someone who didn't know the facts on the ground of this country--whether his political philosophy agreed with yours or not?
Bottom line is we have one of the two parties that won't accept election results except when it wins.
That is profoundly unpatriotic.
Friday, November 9, 2012
Why Romney shouldn't have won--politics aside
On the day of the election--and for the weeks and even months preceeding--Governor Romney knew he had the election in the bag, according to reports gleaned from his inner circle. That's why he only wrote a victory speech.
President Obama and his team were also quietly confident--confident not so much in their ad campaign or in the attendance at their rallies as in their rubber-meets-the-road ground game--all the offices they'd set up, all the retail politics they'd put in place where his campaign had the human face of a neighbor asking your for your vote for him.
Apparently Romney and his team were disdainful of this ground game, and, conversely, supremely confident in their first-hand experience of rallies and sense of momentum.
I'm reminded of the confidence of the Japanese Imperial High Command on the eve of Pearl Harbor. They were confident that their country's fighting spirit and unification under their Emperor would defeat the relatively untheological logistics of the Americans.
Whether the analogy is correct or not, Romney's misplaced confidence--midplaced because the most non-ideological pollsters weren't reading it the way he was--makes me confident the right man won.
Apart from politics, I want the President of the United States to base his efforts, his policies on cold, hard, unvarnished reality. I don't want a dreamer in the White House. I don't want someone there who believes his ideas trump facts.
I want an inductive thinker.
Obama isn't my ideal leader. I don't think he'll make his place in the rankings of American historians much above the 15th place he currently holds. But he'll do a lot better than another President who, like George Bush II, placed more value in what his gut told him than in what unemotional, hard-eyed technical people told him.
I did not think Romney was like this. He was presented to us as Mr. Fixit--as a man of facts. As the guy who'd be America's CEO. Someone tightly wedded to reality.
It's not like he's delusional. He made a much vaster fortune than 99% of Americans have made, and despite his advantages, he still earned that money very skillfully, unlike Bush, who got his money through a skeezy baseball deal. So I'm surprised that he turned out to be less realisticin the sphere of politics than he was in the sphere of business.
Perhaps because politics is more tied to moral values and beliefs for him? But he turned his back on so many values he'd once declared fundamental to his political philosophy.
So in the final analysis, perhaps he just wanted the gig too much, and let that desire swamp his common sense. He has a powerful mind. But a powerful mind can be steered into dark waters full of icebergs.
And in the last analysis, whatever a candidate's political philosophy, Mitt Romney proved in the way he lost that he shouldn't have won.
President Obama and his team were also quietly confident--confident not so much in their ad campaign or in the attendance at their rallies as in their rubber-meets-the-road ground game--all the offices they'd set up, all the retail politics they'd put in place where his campaign had the human face of a neighbor asking your for your vote for him.
Apparently Romney and his team were disdainful of this ground game, and, conversely, supremely confident in their first-hand experience of rallies and sense of momentum.
I'm reminded of the confidence of the Japanese Imperial High Command on the eve of Pearl Harbor. They were confident that their country's fighting spirit and unification under their Emperor would defeat the relatively untheological logistics of the Americans.
Whether the analogy is correct or not, Romney's misplaced confidence--midplaced because the most non-ideological pollsters weren't reading it the way he was--makes me confident the right man won.
Apart from politics, I want the President of the United States to base his efforts, his policies on cold, hard, unvarnished reality. I don't want a dreamer in the White House. I don't want someone there who believes his ideas trump facts.
I want an inductive thinker.
Obama isn't my ideal leader. I don't think he'll make his place in the rankings of American historians much above the 15th place he currently holds. But he'll do a lot better than another President who, like George Bush II, placed more value in what his gut told him than in what unemotional, hard-eyed technical people told him.
I did not think Romney was like this. He was presented to us as Mr. Fixit--as a man of facts. As the guy who'd be America's CEO. Someone tightly wedded to reality.
It's not like he's delusional. He made a much vaster fortune than 99% of Americans have made, and despite his advantages, he still earned that money very skillfully, unlike Bush, who got his money through a skeezy baseball deal. So I'm surprised that he turned out to be less realisticin the sphere of politics than he was in the sphere of business.
Perhaps because politics is more tied to moral values and beliefs for him? But he turned his back on so many values he'd once declared fundamental to his political philosophy.
So in the final analysis, perhaps he just wanted the gig too much, and let that desire swamp his common sense. He has a powerful mind. But a powerful mind can be steered into dark waters full of icebergs.
And in the last analysis, whatever a candidate's political philosophy, Mitt Romney proved in the way he lost that he shouldn't have won.
To filibuster or not to filibuster?
The best way to consider revising the Senate's rules would be to use zero-based budgeting:
That is, supposing we were to have a constitutional convendion and reached the point of determining what rules should be used to govern the Senate--and of those rules, which should be baked into the Constitution.
Let me stipulate that in this hypothetical mission, the Democrats and Republicans each contolled 50 votes in the Senate, and the presidential elections have not yet been held, and all the major opinion polls of likely voters put each team's chances at exactly 50-50.
That is, neither party would have an incentive to jigger the rules to favor the minority or the majority.
So--how would we balance majority vs. minority rights, without regard to the current actual situation or the past four or eight or fifty years?
Some useful principles to use:
1. Transparency: no check or balance should involve anyone being able to gum up the works in secret.
2. Minority rights: while the minority party should be able to slow down particular proceedings; to force issues out of committee for a floor vote; to prevent their will being overrun in secret--at the same time the rules should never permit what would be in effect minority rule.
How about it?
Discussions of this issue are full of tit-for-tatting; hopefully pushing for a zero-based approach can sidestep the endless litary of grievances both sides tend to bring to such debates.
That is, supposing we were to have a constitutional convendion and reached the point of determining what rules should be used to govern the Senate--and of those rules, which should be baked into the Constitution.
Let me stipulate that in this hypothetical mission, the Democrats and Republicans each contolled 50 votes in the Senate, and the presidential elections have not yet been held, and all the major opinion polls of likely voters put each team's chances at exactly 50-50.
That is, neither party would have an incentive to jigger the rules to favor the minority or the majority.
So--how would we balance majority vs. minority rights, without regard to the current actual situation or the past four or eight or fifty years?
Some useful principles to use:
1. Transparency: no check or balance should involve anyone being able to gum up the works in secret.
2. Minority rights: while the minority party should be able to slow down particular proceedings; to force issues out of committee for a floor vote; to prevent their will being overrun in secret--at the same time the rules should never permit what would be in effect minority rule.
How about it?
Discussions of this issue are full of tit-for-tatting; hopefully pushing for a zero-based approach can sidestep the endless litary of grievances both sides tend to bring to such debates.
Thursday, November 8, 2012
What did the American people say Tuesday?
The people re-elected a President who said he'd veto any budget plan that didn't include raising taxes on the rich--specifically, those getting more than $250,000 a year.
The people re-elected a House whose Republican majority had all signed a written pledge to their boss Grover Norquist not to raise any taxes on anyone for any reason whatsoever.
Both liberals and conservatives had advocated waiting on major legislation until this election was over, in hopes that the other side would be swept out of power and the winners would not have to compromise.
Well, the other side wasn't. [side note: if the rest of the world had had a say, the Republicans would have been swept out of office at every level; Democrats and Republicans draw very different conclusions from this factoid, however]
However, the exit polls showed 60% of the public agreeing with the President about hiking taxes on the rich and only 35% agreeing with the Republican House that serves Grover Norquist.
So the public's voting to preserve the previous balance of power was not a vote for gridlock. No poll said that, though that is what diehard Movement Republicans want. But most people were saying with their votes and in the polls that they wanted Washington to compromise.
Compromise.
That means raising taxes--not just eliminating loopholes. Raising taxes.
But not as much as Democrats want.
And it also means cutting back the social safety net.
But not as much as Republicans want.
And they expect President Re-Elect Obama to drive this compromise--not congressional leaders.
The public holds everyone in Washington responsible for the mess and responsible for cleaning it up.
I'll be happy if I'm unhappy with the result.
The people re-elected a House whose Republican majority had all signed a written pledge to their boss Grover Norquist not to raise any taxes on anyone for any reason whatsoever.
Both liberals and conservatives had advocated waiting on major legislation until this election was over, in hopes that the other side would be swept out of power and the winners would not have to compromise.
Well, the other side wasn't. [side note: if the rest of the world had had a say, the Republicans would have been swept out of office at every level; Democrats and Republicans draw very different conclusions from this factoid, however]
However, the exit polls showed 60% of the public agreeing with the President about hiking taxes on the rich and only 35% agreeing with the Republican House that serves Grover Norquist.
So the public's voting to preserve the previous balance of power was not a vote for gridlock. No poll said that, though that is what diehard Movement Republicans want. But most people were saying with their votes and in the polls that they wanted Washington to compromise.
Compromise.
That means raising taxes--not just eliminating loopholes. Raising taxes.
But not as much as Democrats want.
And it also means cutting back the social safety net.
But not as much as Republicans want.
And they expect President Re-Elect Obama to drive this compromise--not congressional leaders.
The public holds everyone in Washington responsible for the mess and responsible for cleaning it up.
I'll be happy if I'm unhappy with the result.
Wednesday, November 7, 2012
President Re-Elect Obama should offer Gov. Romney...
Yes, President Obama should ask Governor Romney to accept the post of Secretary of Business in his new cabinet.
That's the kind of thing Lincoln did. Romney's a smart guy. He knows a lot about business--albeit more as a financier. He has said he isn't running for office again, so taking a post in a Democratic administration wouldn't hurt any career options he's got now.
It would have to be a real job, not a figurehead position. But President Obama has already shown he can do this with he appointment of Bob Gates--a Republican--as Secretary of Defense during his first term. And with President Obama's appointment of his chief Democratic rival to the post of Secretary of State.
So as long as it was a real job, what better way to show his willingness to compromise than to do this? And what better way for the Republicans to show that they heard the voice of the people than to encourage the governor to accept it?
"It's time for our leaders to reach across the aisle."
--Mitt Romney, last night, in his concession speech, speaking to his supporters
I sure hope that everyone who respected his ideas enough to vote for him will respect his ideas to support compromise with the other side now.
That's the kind of thing Lincoln did. Romney's a smart guy. He knows a lot about business--albeit more as a financier. He has said he isn't running for office again, so taking a post in a Democratic administration wouldn't hurt any career options he's got now.
It would have to be a real job, not a figurehead position. But President Obama has already shown he can do this with he appointment of Bob Gates--a Republican--as Secretary of Defense during his first term. And with President Obama's appointment of his chief Democratic rival to the post of Secretary of State.
So as long as it was a real job, what better way to show his willingness to compromise than to do this? And what better way for the Republicans to show that they heard the voice of the people than to encourage the governor to accept it?
"It's time for our leaders to reach across the aisle."
--Mitt Romney, last night, in his concession speech, speaking to his supporters
I sure hope that everyone who respected his ideas enough to vote for him will respect his ideas to support compromise with the other side now.
Tea Party Republicans re-elected President Obama
The Republican Party would have regained control of the Senate, almost without a doubt, IF a number of mainstream (by GOP standards) Republicans had not been ousted in the primaries by Tea Party types.
Mourdock and Akins were the most extreme, but they were not alone. All the pollsters agree that the pols they bumped would have won, and in some other states (such as Massachusetts), the Tea Party incumbent lost to a less extreme on her side Democratic opponent.
And revulsion at these people's extremism tainted the vote for the Presidency as well.
Republicans constantly say "This is a center-right country." I think that's partly the result in well-financed propaganda campaigns and the failure of American public schools to teach critical thinking skills, but whatever the cause of that center-rightness, this election proves that America is NOT a "right wing extremist country."
And the tuition fee for that little lesson cost the GOP control of the Senate and quite possibly the White House.
It will be interesting to see whether the GOP's Tea Party wing--mostly religious extremists in economic conservatives' clothes--have the clarity needed to acknowledge this. The GOP leadership knows this but appears not to know what to do about it.
They have two years to figure it out.
Mourdock and Akins were the most extreme, but they were not alone. All the pollsters agree that the pols they bumped would have won, and in some other states (such as Massachusetts), the Tea Party incumbent lost to a less extreme on her side Democratic opponent.
And revulsion at these people's extremism tainted the vote for the Presidency as well.
Republicans constantly say "This is a center-right country." I think that's partly the result in well-financed propaganda campaigns and the failure of American public schools to teach critical thinking skills, but whatever the cause of that center-rightness, this election proves that America is NOT a "right wing extremist country."
And the tuition fee for that little lesson cost the GOP control of the Senate and quite possibly the White House.
It will be interesting to see whether the GOP's Tea Party wing--mostly religious extremists in economic conservatives' clothes--have the clarity needed to acknowledge this. The GOP leadership knows this but appears not to know what to do about it.
They have two years to figure it out.
Lessons from the election
For Liberals:
You didn't win. President Obama is not a liberal--he's a moderate (except by the standards of right wing ideologues). The House remains firmly in extremely conservative hands. The Senate only retains a slim Democratic majority--not enough to overcome the filibusters the Republicans have shown themselves willing to use at the drop of a hat. And our Constitution gives conservatives more electoral power overall than liberals, due to the nature of the Senate and the Electoral College.
So you can't get what you want nationally. You can get part of what you want, but only by compromising with a powerful faction of angry, embattled, aging white voters who literally hate our President, who believe that compromise is immoral, and who get nearly all their political information from the various organs of the GOP Ministry of Propaganda.
Meaning that many of the things that you accept as facts--they don't. So you don't even have a common basis for discussion with them, much less agreement. And the President has proven himself to be remarkably poor at communicating about his policies with America.
This problem was compounded by the fact that according to nonpartisan factchecking organizations, the President and his allies lied and dissembled a lot during the campaign. The other side did more, but that doesn't justify the lying the Democrats did.
The President's victory last night didn't change any of this. So America's Other Half that Romney so disdained have their work cut out for them. Doing the Victory Dance right now would be a mistake.
For Conservatives:
You should be grateful that you lost the run for the presidency, and lost it outside any margin for error. As conservatives, you want stability. A disputed election full of recounts and lawsuits and, worse yet, the Supreme Court picking a winner do not lead to stability.
You lost the election in part because your leaders lied even more than the Democrats did, and your leaders did it so blatantly and outrageously that it backfired. People you lie to who discover you've been lying to them realize that you've been treating them like idiots. Surprise--people don't appreciate that. It betrays a lack of faith in conservative principles. Not to mention the fact that conservative principles include being honest. When you abandon that you abandon conservatism.
And you lost the election in part because your leaders convinced a majority of Americans that the Republican Party is the party of Aging White Men and their Wives. The constant use of racial dogwhistle attacks on the President fooled no one. If you continue this circle-the-wagons Voertrekker mindset, America's demographics will progressively marginalize you. It is not conservative to be racist. Right now you say you're not racist but you walk like racists and talk like racists who are denying their racism nudge nudge wink wink.
Dismissing General Powell's endorsement of Obama as race-based while calling Condoleeza Rice's endorsement of Romney principled was only the latest of these manifestations.
And this hysterical talk about hating government makes you sound like a bunch of anarchists. It's fine to seek more efficient government, and to oppose government employees making more than their private sector counterparts. It's not fine to just keep saying Big Government Bad. America's federal government is nothing like what ran the Soviet Uniion, and equating the two makes you look stupid. Or that you think the people you're trying to persuade are stupid.
But if you look across all the elections that were held yesterday, you didn't lose, even though you didn't win either. 30 of the nation's governors are Republican. The House is solidly controlled by Republicans. The Senate didn't get a filibuster-proof Democratic majority.
This means that you can get most of what you want at the state level in the majority of states. And in Washington it means that the Democrats can't walk over you--and you can't walk over them.
Your choice is stalemate or compromise. Compromise is not immoral by actual conservative standards. It's only immoral by radical ideologues' standards. Moreover, the message America as a whole sent to Washington was a clear mandate to seek compromise.
For Moderates:
One of yours won re-election to the Presidency, though he'll have to work with the embattled right wingers and left wingers in Congress to get anything done.
And moderates tend to have a fuzzy vision in contrast to the clear, hard, bright visions of the extremists of both sides. We have to work extra-hard, consequently, to articulate a centrist vision for the country. We don't just want a compromise between Left and Right. We want a centrist vision from the President, and it can't stop with inspiring stem-winding speeches. He has to be equally eloquent about the nuts and bolts of implementing that vision.
You didn't win. President Obama is not a liberal--he's a moderate (except by the standards of right wing ideologues). The House remains firmly in extremely conservative hands. The Senate only retains a slim Democratic majority--not enough to overcome the filibusters the Republicans have shown themselves willing to use at the drop of a hat. And our Constitution gives conservatives more electoral power overall than liberals, due to the nature of the Senate and the Electoral College.
So you can't get what you want nationally. You can get part of what you want, but only by compromising with a powerful faction of angry, embattled, aging white voters who literally hate our President, who believe that compromise is immoral, and who get nearly all their political information from the various organs of the GOP Ministry of Propaganda.
Meaning that many of the things that you accept as facts--they don't. So you don't even have a common basis for discussion with them, much less agreement. And the President has proven himself to be remarkably poor at communicating about his policies with America.
This problem was compounded by the fact that according to nonpartisan factchecking organizations, the President and his allies lied and dissembled a lot during the campaign. The other side did more, but that doesn't justify the lying the Democrats did.
The President's victory last night didn't change any of this. So America's Other Half that Romney so disdained have their work cut out for them. Doing the Victory Dance right now would be a mistake.
For Conservatives:
You should be grateful that you lost the run for the presidency, and lost it outside any margin for error. As conservatives, you want stability. A disputed election full of recounts and lawsuits and, worse yet, the Supreme Court picking a winner do not lead to stability.
You lost the election in part because your leaders lied even more than the Democrats did, and your leaders did it so blatantly and outrageously that it backfired. People you lie to who discover you've been lying to them realize that you've been treating them like idiots. Surprise--people don't appreciate that. It betrays a lack of faith in conservative principles. Not to mention the fact that conservative principles include being honest. When you abandon that you abandon conservatism.
And you lost the election in part because your leaders convinced a majority of Americans that the Republican Party is the party of Aging White Men and their Wives. The constant use of racial dogwhistle attacks on the President fooled no one. If you continue this circle-the-wagons Voertrekker mindset, America's demographics will progressively marginalize you. It is not conservative to be racist. Right now you say you're not racist but you walk like racists and talk like racists who are denying their racism nudge nudge wink wink.
Dismissing General Powell's endorsement of Obama as race-based while calling Condoleeza Rice's endorsement of Romney principled was only the latest of these manifestations.
And this hysterical talk about hating government makes you sound like a bunch of anarchists. It's fine to seek more efficient government, and to oppose government employees making more than their private sector counterparts. It's not fine to just keep saying Big Government Bad. America's federal government is nothing like what ran the Soviet Uniion, and equating the two makes you look stupid. Or that you think the people you're trying to persuade are stupid.
But if you look across all the elections that were held yesterday, you didn't lose, even though you didn't win either. 30 of the nation's governors are Republican. The House is solidly controlled by Republicans. The Senate didn't get a filibuster-proof Democratic majority.
This means that you can get most of what you want at the state level in the majority of states. And in Washington it means that the Democrats can't walk over you--and you can't walk over them.
Your choice is stalemate or compromise. Compromise is not immoral by actual conservative standards. It's only immoral by radical ideologues' standards. Moreover, the message America as a whole sent to Washington was a clear mandate to seek compromise.
For Moderates:
One of yours won re-election to the Presidency, though he'll have to work with the embattled right wingers and left wingers in Congress to get anything done.
And moderates tend to have a fuzzy vision in contrast to the clear, hard, bright visions of the extremists of both sides. We have to work extra-hard, consequently, to articulate a centrist vision for the country. We don't just want a compromise between Left and Right. We want a centrist vision from the President, and it can't stop with inspiring stem-winding speeches. He has to be equally eloquent about the nuts and bolts of implementing that vision.
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
The Voters have spoken--but what did they say?
Re-electing a Democratic President and a Republican House and a barely Democratic Senate sends a simple message to Washington:
Compromise! Govern the country! Quit manning the barricades! Come up with solutions that nobody loves but few hate. We are not a country of extremism. America leans toward the middle from both sides. Leave the radical rigidity to backward, barbaric countries.
Capiche?
Compromise! Govern the country! Quit manning the barricades! Come up with solutions that nobody loves but few hate. We are not a country of extremism. America leans toward the middle from both sides. Leave the radical rigidity to backward, barbaric countries.
Capiche?
Good news for conservatives tonight
Conservatives don't realize it for the most part, but they lucked out with President Obama's re-election.
I'm not alone in this estimation. Lifelong Republican General Colin Powell (U.S.Army, Ret.) and The Economist, the world's most prestigious conservative publication, agree with me and me with them.
Winning isn't everything. If Romney had won he'd have won with a campaign that was deceitful and lie-ful even by Washington's low standards. He'd have won as the willing tool of the radicals who have gained control of the GOP through its influence in closed primaries.
For the Republican Party to become a conservative party again it has to lose, like an alcoholic has to hit rock bottom before he'll change his ways.
Until then, true American conservatives need a Democratic President to moderate the radical Republican House. President Re-Elect Obama won't be able to carry out any domestic policy that requires money or legislation or both--and that's 90% of domestic policy. So whatever conservatives think of President Obama's policies, they hardly matter. What matters is how President Obama can force the House to act more in keeping with the average American conservative as opposed to the minority of Republicans who live in Cloud-Cuckoo Land where all taxes are wrong, the President is a Kenyan Muslim Terrorist Socialist who isn't legitimately President, where all abortions should be felony even in cases of rape and incest, and which spends wildly on unnecessary war and "war on drugs" expenditures, return to the pre-Obamacare status quo on healthcare, more deregulation of Wall Street (contrary to what Adam Smith prescribed), and more tax cuts for the highest-incomed 1% of Americans.
None of those things are suited to moderate, Eisenhower-style conservatism. They add up to a harsh, doctrinaire, all-Daddy State no-Mommy State, America Tarzan the rest of the world Jane stance that would be incredibly bad for us. A CEO-in-chief might be palatable if the guy were the former CEO of a manufacturer or services provider. But a CEO who's really just one of those Wall Street financiers, and who stood to profit personally and enormously from his proposed tax policies, fails to fit the Mormon principle of avoiding both sin and the appearance of sin.
I could imagine Governor Romney being a successful President if Congress were Democratic, as was the case in Massachusetts. But that was so not the situation here and now.
Read the Economist's sour endorsement of Obama. It details the conservative argument for voting for Obama and for an Obama win being better for American conservatives than a Romne win would have been, in more detail than I gave here, with plenty of criticism of Obama included.
One last reason for Obama to win re-election is that it enhances our standing abroad with our political and economic partners, and somewhat reduces the poison of Anti-Americanism abroad (except in Pakistan and Israel, the only two countries that would have voted for Romney).
Conservatives in American need to pry themselves loose from the grip of tribalism, and from the grip of being and being seen as the Party of White People. It does the conservative cause no good to have the albatross of Southern White racism wrapped around its neck, just as it did the Democratic Party no good when it had that dead bird on it for the previous century.
Right now Republican radicals will inevitably say this proves Romney wasn't radical enough. The job of real American conservatives is now to try to take back their party.
The path to doing so is to work for stuctural reforms like those California has adopted: nonpartisan redistricting, open primaries, fall elections with the top two vote-getters in each district regardless of party, elimination of winner-take-all electoral college delegate selection--things like that.
As long as the parties are calling the shots instead of the people, this push towards extremism on both sides will go on. The parties need to be less central, less inserted between the voters and their representatives, for conservatives to produce a Republican Party that gains adherents through attractive policies rather than gerrymandering and Rovian propagandizing.
I'm not alone in this estimation. Lifelong Republican General Colin Powell (U.S.Army, Ret.) and The Economist, the world's most prestigious conservative publication, agree with me and me with them.
Winning isn't everything. If Romney had won he'd have won with a campaign that was deceitful and lie-ful even by Washington's low standards. He'd have won as the willing tool of the radicals who have gained control of the GOP through its influence in closed primaries.
For the Republican Party to become a conservative party again it has to lose, like an alcoholic has to hit rock bottom before he'll change his ways.
Until then, true American conservatives need a Democratic President to moderate the radical Republican House. President Re-Elect Obama won't be able to carry out any domestic policy that requires money or legislation or both--and that's 90% of domestic policy. So whatever conservatives think of President Obama's policies, they hardly matter. What matters is how President Obama can force the House to act more in keeping with the average American conservative as opposed to the minority of Republicans who live in Cloud-Cuckoo Land where all taxes are wrong, the President is a Kenyan Muslim Terrorist Socialist who isn't legitimately President, where all abortions should be felony even in cases of rape and incest, and which spends wildly on unnecessary war and "war on drugs" expenditures, return to the pre-Obamacare status quo on healthcare, more deregulation of Wall Street (contrary to what Adam Smith prescribed), and more tax cuts for the highest-incomed 1% of Americans.
None of those things are suited to moderate, Eisenhower-style conservatism. They add up to a harsh, doctrinaire, all-Daddy State no-Mommy State, America Tarzan the rest of the world Jane stance that would be incredibly bad for us. A CEO-in-chief might be palatable if the guy were the former CEO of a manufacturer or services provider. But a CEO who's really just one of those Wall Street financiers, and who stood to profit personally and enormously from his proposed tax policies, fails to fit the Mormon principle of avoiding both sin and the appearance of sin.
I could imagine Governor Romney being a successful President if Congress were Democratic, as was the case in Massachusetts. But that was so not the situation here and now.
Read the Economist's sour endorsement of Obama. It details the conservative argument for voting for Obama and for an Obama win being better for American conservatives than a Romne win would have been, in more detail than I gave here, with plenty of criticism of Obama included.
One last reason for Obama to win re-election is that it enhances our standing abroad with our political and economic partners, and somewhat reduces the poison of Anti-Americanism abroad (except in Pakistan and Israel, the only two countries that would have voted for Romney).
Conservatives in American need to pry themselves loose from the grip of tribalism, and from the grip of being and being seen as the Party of White People. It does the conservative cause no good to have the albatross of Southern White racism wrapped around its neck, just as it did the Democratic Party no good when it had that dead bird on it for the previous century.
Right now Republican radicals will inevitably say this proves Romney wasn't radical enough. The job of real American conservatives is now to try to take back their party.
The path to doing so is to work for stuctural reforms like those California has adopted: nonpartisan redistricting, open primaries, fall elections with the top two vote-getters in each district regardless of party, elimination of winner-take-all electoral college delegate selection--things like that.
As long as the parties are calling the shots instead of the people, this push towards extremism on both sides will go on. The parties need to be less central, less inserted between the voters and their representatives, for conservatives to produce a Republican Party that gains adherents through attractive policies rather than gerrymandering and Rovian propagandizing.
What this country needs most on Election Day
...is a fair election. One that any rational conservative, moderate or liberal would accept.
One without voter fraud or voter suppression.
One where the people and organizations paying for every ad, flyer, rally, robocall and email is known.
One where a handful of billionaires can't drown out the voices of everyone else.
One where the voters have been trained in critical thinking.
One where no politician can lie or deceive without being called on it as publicly as the lie/deception was made.
One where no President can be elected that doesn't represent a majority of voters.
One where every adult American is registered automatically via a nationwide universal biometric ID database like the one India has been implementing, and no one--not even serial killers on Death Row--is disenfranchised.
One where no one has to wait in line to vote more than an hour.
One where no faction can get away with claiming they lost through chicanery if they didn't.
One where every state's elections are run by a nonpartisan organization--not by partisan officials whose careers are predicated on them delivering their state to their patrons.
One where every state sends its electors in proportion to that state's vote, rather than a winner take all system that makes every state but a handful irrelevant.
If, after the election, many millions of Americans have solid reason to believe that their side lost through chicanery, then American democracy will have become a cautionary tale for other nations rather than a shining beacon.
And even if the presidential election itself was conducted fairly, if the public opinion expressed in that election was manufactured through massive, well-financed, lying and deceptive propaganda campaigns, once again we become a cautionary tale.
And even if the presidential election rises above the tidal waves of propaganda flooding the nation, if many state legislatures and state supreme courts and congressional seats have been purchased by billionaires' money spent via secret contributions, again we become a cautionary tale.
One without voter fraud or voter suppression.
One where the people and organizations paying for every ad, flyer, rally, robocall and email is known.
One where a handful of billionaires can't drown out the voices of everyone else.
One where the voters have been trained in critical thinking.
One where no politician can lie or deceive without being called on it as publicly as the lie/deception was made.
One where no President can be elected that doesn't represent a majority of voters.
One where every adult American is registered automatically via a nationwide universal biometric ID database like the one India has been implementing, and no one--not even serial killers on Death Row--is disenfranchised.
One where no one has to wait in line to vote more than an hour.
One where no faction can get away with claiming they lost through chicanery if they didn't.
One where every state's elections are run by a nonpartisan organization--not by partisan officials whose careers are predicated on them delivering their state to their patrons.
One where every state sends its electors in proportion to that state's vote, rather than a winner take all system that makes every state but a handful irrelevant.
If, after the election, many millions of Americans have solid reason to believe that their side lost through chicanery, then American democracy will have become a cautionary tale for other nations rather than a shining beacon.
And even if the presidential election itself was conducted fairly, if the public opinion expressed in that election was manufactured through massive, well-financed, lying and deceptive propaganda campaigns, once again we become a cautionary tale.
And even if the presidential election rises above the tidal waves of propaganda flooding the nation, if many state legislatures and state supreme courts and congressional seats have been purchased by billionaires' money spent via secret contributions, again we become a cautionary tale.
Monday, November 5, 2012
Media Bias Proven--and Proven--and Proven
I was discussing Fox TV vs. MSNBC TV with a Republican friend. I said Fox was much, much more biased than MSNBC; my friend said the opposite, which I scoffed at.
My friend dug up a recent report from the Pew Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.
It proved that MSBNBC was much, much more biased against Romney than Fox TV was against Romney. So I had to eat my words.
Well, except for the mental reservation that MSNBC's negative tone about Romney could be based on fact, while Fox's negativity about Obama could be based on propaganda.
Also, this study wasn't about bias per se. It was about tone--negative, positive, neutral. It did not deal with other crucial elements of bias, such as truthfulness and proportionality (blowing up the important of true but relatively minor issues with the unfavored candidate, while minimizing the importance of negative facts about the favored candidate. These things weren't covered.
I heard the same study cited this morning on one of the local right wing radio stations--Huckabee's show in particular.
But--what no one on the right mentioned was the fact that this same study covered the mainstream media--major newspapers, TV news, radio news, and major mainstream Internet presence--and that the mainstream media, overall, showed exactly zero tilt towards either candidate.
No bias at all--other than that the ratio of positive to negative stories varied up and down in accordance with public opinion polls. This substantiates my belief that the mainstream media is biased in favor of gaining audience, which is necessary to gain advertising. So they'll chase anything that grabs eyeballs. Romney's 47% speech? You betcha. Obama's spectacular loss of the first debate? You betcha--equally.
The Republican Universe (Republiverse) works like a religious cult, just as North Korea's government does. A key feature of every cult is to get you to shun contact with information sources that aren't in line with the cult's propaganda.
Thus not an hour passes on any of the right wing media--radio, TV, internet, whatever--without you being reminded that the mainstream media is totally biased--in the tank for Obama--and that therefore you can't trust them. You can only trust the right wing media.
This study that they're quoting proves that this is flat-out-false.
And while MSNBC is super-negative about Romney, Fox is only better by comparison. True, only 3% of Romney stories on MSNBC were positive on MSNBC. But only 6% of stories on Obama were positive on Fox. And unlike Fox, MSNBC's negative messages on Obama aren't reinforced by a very large, well-financed national network of right wing radio stations.
I'm not justifying MSNBC's tack, and it's also true that MSNBC's defense--that its news programs are unbiased, that only its pundit shows are biased--is false. I watch the "news programs" on both Fox and MSNBC, and both run the party line in terms of what stories are put forth and what aspects are emphasized. Even MSNBC's early morning right wing program--Joe Scarborough's--pits his against a liberal co-host and numerous liberal guests. Fox, similarly, has a few liberal punching bags on its shows.
Fox and MSNBC are dedicated to their side, from one end to the other.
Lastly, being on one side does not equate with lying on behalf of that side. The Pew study cited didn't deal with that. Nor did it deal with things like incitement to murder, which Fox's Bill O'Reilly virtually did several years ago in his campaign against a gynecologist who provided abortions in the midwest. That campaign only ended when the gynecologist was murdered, in the church he attended, during a service, by an anti-abortion terrorist.
I've never seen MSNBC go that far.
My friend dug up a recent report from the Pew Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.
It proved that MSBNBC was much, much more biased against Romney than Fox TV was against Romney. So I had to eat my words.
Well, except for the mental reservation that MSNBC's negative tone about Romney could be based on fact, while Fox's negativity about Obama could be based on propaganda.
Also, this study wasn't about bias per se. It was about tone--negative, positive, neutral. It did not deal with other crucial elements of bias, such as truthfulness and proportionality (blowing up the important of true but relatively minor issues with the unfavored candidate, while minimizing the importance of negative facts about the favored candidate. These things weren't covered.
I heard the same study cited this morning on one of the local right wing radio stations--Huckabee's show in particular.
But--what no one on the right mentioned was the fact that this same study covered the mainstream media--major newspapers, TV news, radio news, and major mainstream Internet presence--and that the mainstream media, overall, showed exactly zero tilt towards either candidate.
No bias at all--other than that the ratio of positive to negative stories varied up and down in accordance with public opinion polls. This substantiates my belief that the mainstream media is biased in favor of gaining audience, which is necessary to gain advertising. So they'll chase anything that grabs eyeballs. Romney's 47% speech? You betcha. Obama's spectacular loss of the first debate? You betcha--equally.
The Republican Universe (Republiverse) works like a religious cult, just as North Korea's government does. A key feature of every cult is to get you to shun contact with information sources that aren't in line with the cult's propaganda.
Thus not an hour passes on any of the right wing media--radio, TV, internet, whatever--without you being reminded that the mainstream media is totally biased--in the tank for Obama--and that therefore you can't trust them. You can only trust the right wing media.
This study that they're quoting proves that this is flat-out-false.
And while MSNBC is super-negative about Romney, Fox is only better by comparison. True, only 3% of Romney stories on MSNBC were positive on MSNBC. But only 6% of stories on Obama were positive on Fox. And unlike Fox, MSNBC's negative messages on Obama aren't reinforced by a very large, well-financed national network of right wing radio stations.
I'm not justifying MSNBC's tack, and it's also true that MSNBC's defense--that its news programs are unbiased, that only its pundit shows are biased--is false. I watch the "news programs" on both Fox and MSNBC, and both run the party line in terms of what stories are put forth and what aspects are emphasized. Even MSNBC's early morning right wing program--Joe Scarborough's--pits his against a liberal co-host and numerous liberal guests. Fox, similarly, has a few liberal punching bags on its shows.
Fox and MSNBC are dedicated to their side, from one end to the other.
Lastly, being on one side does not equate with lying on behalf of that side. The Pew study cited didn't deal with that. Nor did it deal with things like incitement to murder, which Fox's Bill O'Reilly virtually did several years ago in his campaign against a gynecologist who provided abortions in the midwest. That campaign only ended when the gynecologist was murdered, in the church he attended, during a service, by an anti-abortion terrorist.
I've never seen MSNBC go that far.
Friday, November 2, 2012
The GOP has become the PWP (Party of White People)
Honestly, both major parties were White People's Parties back in the '50s. Then the Democrats grew a spine and stood up to their Southern flank, and Nixon with his Southern Strategy took them in...and than they took over the GOP. Getting the Southern white racist vote had corrupted the Democrats for many decades. Now it's done the same to the Republicans.
One of the more entertaining symptoms has been how the members of the infected Party who are not racist (but are willing to get in bed with them) turn themselves inside out to describe their party's racist policies as not that at all, nossir. Anything but.
The Democrats did it. Now the Republicans do it.
And they often fool themselves that they're just supporting perfectly reasonable color-blind policies--such as promoting strict laws aimed at preventing anyone who might not be qualified to vote from voting, in the interests of preventing voter fraud.
Guess who isn't fooled?
Most Americans who aren't White. Along with White Americans who arent' ideologically hogtied.
About a quarter of Hispanic Americans and around 5% of Blacks are so religiously conservative that they'll hold their noses and vote Republican.
The rest know better.
They've read the signs:
1. The personal hostility towards President Obama, a moderate centrist and devoted compromiser who's also a professed Christian and devoted family man with a far better record of personal conduct than many of the Republican leadership.
This is not to put Obama above criticism, and I certainly don't. But what I've seen even in the college town I live in, from many of the Republicans I know, is something more intense than policy disagreements can justify.
The Democrats dislike Romney for what he does. The Republicans hate Obama for what he is.
2. The hostility towards illegal immigrants--not to be confused with opposition to illegal immigration. The real culprits are the political patrons who want illegal immigration so they can bust unions and pay workers less, and the politicians who exploit ethnic tribalism. The illegal immigrants themselves are pawns, but they bear the brunt of GOP hostility, and to legal Hispanic immigrants and their offspring this hostility looks like hostility towards Hispanics in general.
3. A criminal justice system carefully crafted to deny Black men the vote, through differential prosecution and, in many GOP-dominated states, lifelong disenfranchisement for felons.
4. The national GOP campaign to prevent voter fraud, which to Blacks and many others looks like nothing more or less than a continuation to the South's century-long disenfranchisement system for blacks. Poll taxes have been rerplaced by reckless voter purges, efforts to make voter registration campaigns criminal offenses, poll "watchers" who confront Blacks and Hispanics trying to vote, and more.
5. The GOP convention: a rainbow of Blacks, Hispanics, Whites and other on the podium, speaking to a lily-white convention hall full of delegates, with few exceptions. Surprise--Blacks, Hispanics and ideologically-unimpaired Whites noticed the extreme disparity. The Democratic convention speakers looked the delegates on the floor. Blacks, Hispanics, Asians etc. noticed this as well.
6. Support for English as the official American language coupled with opposition to polyglot ballots.
7. Overtly racist stuff around the edges, always denied by the GOP leadership--T shirts showing Obama with a monkey body at rallies, hand-drawn placards saying bluntly racist things.
8. Constant use of dogwhistle code words and phrases, such as talk about welfare queens and moochers who just want to live on the government dole--no racist words; just racist vectors which American Blacks in particular have been hearing from whites in suits and ties all their lives.
I'm not saying all of this is wrong. I'm against illegal immigration myself, and for official English and English-only ballots, for that matter. Heck, I'm even for the "self-deportation" Obama ridiculed Romney for proposing.
I am saying that the aggregate effect of all this, taken together, is that the Republican Party has morphed into the Party of White People. In a country where Whites will be a minority in a few decades. Republican strategists know this and are sweating bullets about it. But they're trapped. Their tactics became their strategy, whether they wanted that to happen or not.
One of the more entertaining symptoms has been how the members of the infected Party who are not racist (but are willing to get in bed with them) turn themselves inside out to describe their party's racist policies as not that at all, nossir. Anything but.
The Democrats did it. Now the Republicans do it.
And they often fool themselves that they're just supporting perfectly reasonable color-blind policies--such as promoting strict laws aimed at preventing anyone who might not be qualified to vote from voting, in the interests of preventing voter fraud.
Guess who isn't fooled?
Most Americans who aren't White. Along with White Americans who arent' ideologically hogtied.
About a quarter of Hispanic Americans and around 5% of Blacks are so religiously conservative that they'll hold their noses and vote Republican.
The rest know better.
They've read the signs:
1. The personal hostility towards President Obama, a moderate centrist and devoted compromiser who's also a professed Christian and devoted family man with a far better record of personal conduct than many of the Republican leadership.
This is not to put Obama above criticism, and I certainly don't. But what I've seen even in the college town I live in, from many of the Republicans I know, is something more intense than policy disagreements can justify.
The Democrats dislike Romney for what he does. The Republicans hate Obama for what he is.
2. The hostility towards illegal immigrants--not to be confused with opposition to illegal immigration. The real culprits are the political patrons who want illegal immigration so they can bust unions and pay workers less, and the politicians who exploit ethnic tribalism. The illegal immigrants themselves are pawns, but they bear the brunt of GOP hostility, and to legal Hispanic immigrants and their offspring this hostility looks like hostility towards Hispanics in general.
3. A criminal justice system carefully crafted to deny Black men the vote, through differential prosecution and, in many GOP-dominated states, lifelong disenfranchisement for felons.
4. The national GOP campaign to prevent voter fraud, which to Blacks and many others looks like nothing more or less than a continuation to the South's century-long disenfranchisement system for blacks. Poll taxes have been rerplaced by reckless voter purges, efforts to make voter registration campaigns criminal offenses, poll "watchers" who confront Blacks and Hispanics trying to vote, and more.
5. The GOP convention: a rainbow of Blacks, Hispanics, Whites and other on the podium, speaking to a lily-white convention hall full of delegates, with few exceptions. Surprise--Blacks, Hispanics and ideologically-unimpaired Whites noticed the extreme disparity. The Democratic convention speakers looked the delegates on the floor. Blacks, Hispanics, Asians etc. noticed this as well.
6. Support for English as the official American language coupled with opposition to polyglot ballots.
7. Overtly racist stuff around the edges, always denied by the GOP leadership--T shirts showing Obama with a monkey body at rallies, hand-drawn placards saying bluntly racist things.
8. Constant use of dogwhistle code words and phrases, such as talk about welfare queens and moochers who just want to live on the government dole--no racist words; just racist vectors which American Blacks in particular have been hearing from whites in suits and ties all their lives.
I'm not saying all of this is wrong. I'm against illegal immigration myself, and for official English and English-only ballots, for that matter. Heck, I'm even for the "self-deportation" Obama ridiculed Romney for proposing.
I am saying that the aggregate effect of all this, taken together, is that the Republican Party has morphed into the Party of White People. In a country where Whites will be a minority in a few decades. Republican strategists know this and are sweating bullets about it. But they're trapped. Their tactics became their strategy, whether they wanted that to happen or not.
The Economist reluctantly endorses President Obama
The Economist endorsed Barack Obama for President as the lesser of two evils. You can read it here. Thousands of comments followed, many from people frothing at the mouth over The Economist's temerity (not that many of them know words like that).
Then someone mentioned that many of the comments were so unhinged that they didn't seem to come from actual Economist readers.
I said:
re: comments coming from right wing trolls who are obviously not readers of this publication
I've seen the same thing around the Internet. Scientific American, America's most prestigious scientific publication for general readers, regularly has its comment threads filled with rants by people who deny evolution, global warming, scientific method, the ethics of the scientific community, identifying the Democratic Party as a Com-yew-nist front organization--you name it.
Same thing on Amazon.com's Science forums.
Same thing on the NY Times and washington Post.
In all cases there are blizzards of entries, always impassioned, always logically impaired, often grammatically impaired as well. Often in such volume they threaten to overwhelm the comment threads, making the threads useless for the purpose intended (exchange of ideas).
Rather like what happened at the Town Hall hearings over ObamaCare that Congressmen gave the summer before it was passed. Remember them? They'd pull tricks like spacing themselves throughout the hall, then jumping up, shouting a slogan, then sitting down; right after another would jump up, shout something, sit down. They'd repeat this so no one member of their group could be ejected--and so the town hall meeting couldn't be conducted successfully.
So how'd they show up at these meetings, organized like that? How do they show up on the comment threads of magazines and sites they obviously don't read?
This is the essence of AstroTurfing. These people aren't being paid to do this, but the folks that organize them and send them out on these, well, missions--ARE paid operatives, running right wing websites, often pretending to be just patriotic, Consitution-luvvin' citizens.
Not paid by the Republican National Committee, of course. Paid by their patrons.
I can't prove this but it fits the facts. It's sure obvious that these ranters aren't Economist readers.
What's ironic is that these commentors exemplify EXACTLY why the Economist ever so reluctantly has endorsed President Obama: because America's Republican Party has become too extreme, too unhinged, too obsessed with removing America's first black president (purely a coincidence, that, right?), to be entrusted with the White House.
Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and even their ostensible deity Ronald Reagan would be dismayed by what the GOP has morphed into.
Then someone mentioned that many of the comments were so unhinged that they didn't seem to come from actual Economist readers.
I said:
re: comments coming from right wing trolls who are obviously not readers of this publication
I've seen the same thing around the Internet. Scientific American, America's most prestigious scientific publication for general readers, regularly has its comment threads filled with rants by people who deny evolution, global warming, scientific method, the ethics of the scientific community, identifying the Democratic Party as a Com-yew-nist front organization--you name it.
Same thing on Amazon.com's Science forums.
Same thing on the NY Times and washington Post.
In all cases there are blizzards of entries, always impassioned, always logically impaired, often grammatically impaired as well. Often in such volume they threaten to overwhelm the comment threads, making the threads useless for the purpose intended (exchange of ideas).
Rather like what happened at the Town Hall hearings over ObamaCare that Congressmen gave the summer before it was passed. Remember them? They'd pull tricks like spacing themselves throughout the hall, then jumping up, shouting a slogan, then sitting down; right after another would jump up, shout something, sit down. They'd repeat this so no one member of their group could be ejected--and so the town hall meeting couldn't be conducted successfully.
So how'd they show up at these meetings, organized like that? How do they show up on the comment threads of magazines and sites they obviously don't read?
This is the essence of AstroTurfing. These people aren't being paid to do this, but the folks that organize them and send them out on these, well, missions--ARE paid operatives, running right wing websites, often pretending to be just patriotic, Consitution-luvvin' citizens.
Not paid by the Republican National Committee, of course. Paid by their patrons.
I can't prove this but it fits the facts. It's sure obvious that these ranters aren't Economist readers.
What's ironic is that these commentors exemplify EXACTLY why the Economist ever so reluctantly has endorsed President Obama: because America's Republican Party has become too extreme, too unhinged, too obsessed with removing America's first black president (purely a coincidence, that, right?), to be entrusted with the White House.
Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and even their ostensible deity Ronald Reagan would be dismayed by what the GOP has morphed into.
Thursday, November 1, 2012
The loneliness of voting as an independent
Here in California the initiative process lets us do the legislature's work. Too bad we voters also don't get the legislators' perks.
This time there are 10 initiatives on the ballot. As you'd expect the two major parties have positions on most of them. But I found myself voting with the Democratic Party on some of them, and with the Republican Party on others.
This comes at a cost. Each party offers a comfortable tribal embrace to its partisans. I feel the pull all the time. Voting is a snap--you just vote the Party line. At social gatherings you get to enjoy the mutual backpatting society thing.
We're designed by evolution to live in tribes, so being an independent really goes against the grain of our biology.
Same goes for the presidential race. If you read this blog you know I'm voting for President Obama. But I agree with factcheck.org and politifact.com that he and his campaign stray from strict truthfulness way too often for my taste.
I read comment threads for articles about the candidates in the mainstream media and they're full of people who see their guy as All Right and the other as All Wrong.
Must be comforting to Believe that way.
So to other independents I'd like to say you're not alone. In fact you represent a plurality of voters. We just can't go to the Party's parties and feel the luv like the partisans do.
This time there are 10 initiatives on the ballot. As you'd expect the two major parties have positions on most of them. But I found myself voting with the Democratic Party on some of them, and with the Republican Party on others.
This comes at a cost. Each party offers a comfortable tribal embrace to its partisans. I feel the pull all the time. Voting is a snap--you just vote the Party line. At social gatherings you get to enjoy the mutual backpatting society thing.
We're designed by evolution to live in tribes, so being an independent really goes against the grain of our biology.
Same goes for the presidential race. If you read this blog you know I'm voting for President Obama. But I agree with factcheck.org and politifact.com that he and his campaign stray from strict truthfulness way too often for my taste.
I read comment threads for articles about the candidates in the mainstream media and they're full of people who see their guy as All Right and the other as All Wrong.
Must be comforting to Believe that way.
So to other independents I'd like to say you're not alone. In fact you represent a plurality of voters. We just can't go to the Party's parties and feel the luv like the partisans do.
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