One Minnesota Ballot Initiative I Could Support

As we all know, we have a representative democracy, where we elect leaders to represent us in matters of governance. Depending on how we feel about how they represent us, we either vote them in or out. We don’t have a direct democracy, where the masses directly decide detailed governance issues. No nation on the planet has such a system, unless you consider California a nation.

Representative democracy has worked out well for us. Thanks to in large part to a series of difficult compromises crafted in our legislative bodies, we have one of the most successful states in the nation, and one of the most successful nations in the world.

Tell this to the Minnesota Legislature. Because it is utterly unwilling to compromise, it has not been able to pass much of anything. Therefore, they are passing the buck to voters to do their work for them. The following ballot initiatives may be in front of voters this fall:

• Ban thousands of Minnesotans’ right to marry.
• Ban voting for those lacking a photo ID, disproportionately elderly, disabled, poor, and minority Minnesotans.
• Make it almost impossible to reach legislative compromises involving taxation.

I don’t think much of these ideas. But I think even less of the underlying process that increasingly undercuts our heretofore successful system of representative democracy.

However, there is one ballot initiative I could support. I wrote it this morning in in my parlor with a feather quill, but I have faithfully transferred it to typeface for you:

“Shall the Minnesota Constitution be amended to require an affirmative vote of seven-eighths of the State Legislature before more Constitutional amendments can clutter voters’ ballots?

Please sign the petition and consider making a donation at makethemdotheirjobs.com.

- Loveland

Anoka Anti-Bullying Effort is Economic Development?

The War on Differentness

Today’s news reminds us that many parents, kids, and teachers in the Anoka County schools continue to oppose policies designed to prevent bullying of LGBT kids, and others. To them, such policies represent “politically correct (PC)” frivolity, or “promoting the gay agenda.”

But this isn’t just about politics or PC gotchas. There are a lot of other pretty solid reasons for supporting such initiatives. Common decency. Constitutional equality. The Golden Rule.

But since those arguments haven’t swayed opponents of anti-gay bullying initiatives yet, here’s another reason that might resonate on the right.

Jobs, jobs, jobs.

In the book “The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth,” author Alexandra Robbins makes the case for Quirk Theory.

Many of the differences that cause a student to be excluded in school are the same traits or real-world skills that others will value, love, respect, or find compelling about that person in adulthood and outside of the school setting.

Quirk theory suggests that popularity in school is not a key to success and satisfaction in adulthood. Conventional notions of popularity are wrong. What if popularity is not the same thing as social success? What if students who are considered outsiders aren’t really socially inadequate at all? Being an outsider doesn’t necessarily indicate any sort of social failing. We do not view a tuba player as musically challenged if he cannot play the violin. He’s just a different kind of musician. A sprinter is still considered an athlete even if she can’t play basketball. She’s a different kind of athlete. Rather than view the cafeteria fringe as less socially successful than the popular crowd, we could simply accept that they are a different kind of social.

To support her theory, Robbins cites many examples of people who were “cafeteria fringe” in high school – “geeks, loners, punks, floaters, nerds, freaks, dorks, gamers, bandies, art kids, theater geeks, choir kids, Goths, weirdos, indies, scenes, emos, skaters, and various types of racial and other minorities” — but later were a resounding success in the adult world. J.K. Rowling. Bruce Springsteen. Steve Jobs. Tim Gunn. Bill Gates.

How many jobs and exports do you suppose those marginalized cafeteria fringers have created for the cafeteria core dwellers?

As for LGBT students, George Mason University Professor George Florida employs a “Bohemian-Gay Index” to find that the more “gay friendly” a city is, the more economically successful it tends to be.

So, maybe this anti-bullying business is about more than just fluffy PC-ness?

Schools can’t eliminate bullying, but they can do more. Robbins finds that teachers and administratrators aren’t nearly as neutral as they claim to be in the War on Differentness. They enforce social hierarchies by creating institutional mechanisms for celebrating athletics, cheerleading and a few select activities over all others. Teachers and administrators set the social cues by who they choose to befriend, praise or spend time with. And they too often turn blind eyes toward subtle and not-so-subtle cruelty.

So, Anoka anti-bullying champions, keep fighting the good fight. It’s the right thing to do. Besides, the jocks could use some more jobs right now.

- Loveland

One Floridian’s Wisdom: Vote Pro Life

I visited with a Florida native today about the coming elections — Tuesday’s Florida Republican primary and November’s general election.

I crossed paths with this Floridian when he was on his way to work. He’s a fisherman, in the later years of his life. He’s conservative. He works hard, has all his life, gets no handouts.

He’s a single-issue guy — it’s all about the environment for him.

He can’t vote. He has no photo ID, no green card, no street address, no fingerprints. He has a dorsal fin. He’s strong, fit, about seven or eight feet tall — or long, I guess.

He’s a dolphin. He’s for Florida, not for oil. He’s pro-life, not pro-consumption at any cost.

I was kayaking near our house, paddling just off the shore of the Gulf of Mexico. I looked west and saw a large dorsal fin coming my way. After nervously hearing a little “Jaws” music in my head, I heard the blow — fast exhale/inhale — and relaxed in the company of a dolphin. He crossed right in front of me, heading for the shallows where so many fish had been jumping they’d made a symphony of splashing. The dolphin chased fish in two or three feet of water, circling tighter and faster to rodeo the fish in the center and grabbing one or two that didn’t leap out of the way. He was magnificent.

After a few minutes he headed out to deeper water and I paddled around a little mangrove island. Ten minutes later I heard him splashing again on the other side of the island, paddled close to him once more as he stroked his way into the shallow fishing ground again. For the next half hour I watched from 10, 20, 40 feet away as he circled, flapped his tail, chased his dinner and graced me with the closest view of a dolphin in nature I’ve ever had.

The Gulf water was crystal clear. The mangrove shallows were burgeoning with life. These coastal marshes are rich nurseries for fish, shellfish and birds. They are glorious, fragile and threatened.

After catching several fish — he needs about 30 pounds a day — the dolphin swam about 50 yards off shore and rested, belly on the shallow bottom, blowhole rising above water every 30 seconds or so. He was tired. I suspect he is old. Many of us down here are.

We talked. I listened. Really. He’s tired of the threats to his home. He asked me to vote for Marjory Stoneman Douglas, the great Florida environmentalist. Or for Sigurd Olson. Or Edward Abbey. Or Aldo Leopold. I told him all these people are dead. He was sad to hear that.

He asked me if we humans don’t realize that this environment we’re ruining is our home too. I just floated near him and had no answer.

We were quiet together, then I thanked him for the gam, and he turned to deeper water.

Three words I did not hear from the dolphin:

Drill Baby Drill.

– Bruce Benidt
(Photo from keywestdivecenter.com)

Oops

On paper, Rick Perry entered the race as arguably the strongest contender to get the GOP Presidential nomination.

• Governors do better than members of Congress in presidential politics, particularly in a year when Congress has record-low support. Perry was a long-serving Governor who had never worked in DC.

• Southerners tend do better than northerners in a Dixie–dominated GOP party. Perry was arguably the only southerner in the field. (I think Newt feels more DC to most.)

• Republicans are seemingly more obsessed than ever with the Reagan mystique. Perry’s swagger and look was arguably the most Reaganesque.

• The economy is the paramount issue in 2012. Perry had been running a state doing relatively well economically.

• Presidential campaigns require lots of money. The darling of the Texas corporate class and national political opportunists had more money than most in the field, both for his own campaign and for pro-Perry Super PACs.

• Republican activists are very intolerant of political compromise. Perry had governed in a state so conservative than he rarely had to compromise (unlike Romney and Pawlenty, for instance).

• Being a white male Protestant conservative is a key political asset in the Republican Party. Post-Pawlenty, Perry had that advantage to himself.

Because Perry was so strong on paper, I originally thought he would win the nomination, and had the best shot against Obama. He had the longest list of important political assets.

But at the end of the day, Presidents are not picked on paper. You have to execute, and Perry just was never able to execute on a communications level. Oops.

- Loveland

Minnesotans Shouldering Hidden Anti-Obamacare Tax

This week the Minnesota Hospital Association (MHA) announced that its member hospitals paid $226 million in “charity care” last year. The MHA is referring to instances when uninsured and underinsured patients are unable to pay their hospital bills, and the hospitals get stuck with the expenses.

While the term “charity care” is used by hospitals, hospitals don’t end up bearing the whole burden. They make up for the bills substantially by charging more to their insured patients, and insurance companies subsequently shift these higher costs to insurance premium payers.

This post isn’t meant to be a criticism of either the hospitals or the insurers. They would go out of business if they couldn’t shift costs.

Supporters of preserving the Anti-Obamacare Tax.

But it is meant to be a criticism of Obamacare obstructionists. The MHA numbers are a reminder that those who have been aggressively blocking efforts to reduce the number of uninsured and underinsured through Obamacare are responsible for maintaining what is akin to an enormous annual tax on premium payers. An Anti-Obamacare Tax.

Given that a fully implemented Obamacare is predicted to reduce the uninsured rate from today’s 50.7 million people to about 18.7 million, and the number of underinsured people by about 70%, leaders opposing Obamacare in Congress, state legislatures and federal courts are effectively blocking the elimination of a huge annual burden on American households. If the anti-Obamacare obstructionists win, we all keep paying this Anti-Obamacare Tax.

And it’s not a small tax. In Ramsey County, taxpayers are up in arms over a proposed $10 million per year tax for the Vikings stadium. This hidden Anti-Obamacare Tax is much more painful. The Center for American Progress finds “on average, 8 percent of families’ 2009 health care premiums—approximately $1,100 a year—is due to our broken system that fails to cover the uninsured.”

- Loveland

STOP SOPA AND HER EVIL TWIN PIPA [UPDATED]

Quick. What do Wikipedia, Google, Facebook, eBay, Yahoo, Michele Bachmann and Ellen Mrja have in common? (Yes, I said Michele Bachmann.)

They’re all against HR 3261: Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and her evil twin in the Senate, the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA). What a disappointment that Minnesota senators Amy Klobuchar and Al Franken support these well-intentioned but thoroughly misguided stepping stones into internet censorship. Boo!

The best description of SOPA can be found on the propublica.org site, which calls this battle a “SOPA Opera.” There you’ll find the mark-up of the bill and its history. But in a nutshell…

What drives these two pieces of proposed legislation is the loss of billions of dollars annually by the motion picture, recording and other copyright-driven industries by illegally downloaded music, pirated movies and rogue websites. In particular, foreign rogue websites are called out for mass producing pirated American films before the movie is scarcely in domestic release, resulting in a staggering loss of money executives have not yet found a way to recover.

And so, on the one side you have Warner Bros., Paramount Studios, Sony Music. They’re joined by the rest of “old Hollywood,” the Motion Picture Association of America, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (“There’s NO business like SHOW business..!” and, odd-fellow in, the AFL-CIO.

But in the other corner you have the Silicon Valley slicks, the new geniuses who envision and then execute the sites that have transformed how we interact, find news, purchase goods and services, trade information. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Mozilla, all were founded on the proposition that the internet is an anarchy and that’s what makes it open to experimentation, trial-error, “let’s blow this up and see what happens” thinking.

I also vote for anarchy. Michele Bachmann probably has a much saner reason, as I’ll explain in a moment.

Key to making SOPA and PIPA work is the ability for companies that believe they’ve had material ripped off to go to the U.S. Justice Department which could use sweeping new powers to “go after” these sites. How would this be done? In any combination of the following:

*By punishing sites that infringe on copyright OR EVEN THOSE THAT LINK to these sites.

*By shutting down financial transfers to these sites (the same technique used against WikiLeaks when Assange’s supporters mirrored his work forward) and

*By giving Internet Service Providers (ISPs) such as Verizon or Comcast the power to voluntarily block sites through so-called “vigilante provisions.” Entire sites could be shut down through something called DNS Blocking. Domain Name System (DNS) is the text-based address we use to identify different computers on the internet. The DNS names are cross-listed with Internet Protocol (IP) addresses in online databases; each computer, including yours right now, has its own IP address (a series of numbers and periods). So, by blocking entire DNS sites, the government also now has a listing of the IPs that were visiting that address.

I’m going to guess it’s this unprecedented intrusion by Big Government into law-abiding American internet users’ homes that Bachmann finds so objectionable; I know I do. Right now the U.S. Supreme Court has given the internet full First Amendment protections — from government. Even any attempt at
any power by the government to censor this most glorious of new media must be fought at every turn. The government never goes backward on its powers.

And POTUS? Well, he’s taken his typical political approach to this legislation. While he “believe we must protect the livelihoods of creative industries…blah, blah, blah,..we must also make sure cyberspace does not become the home of censorship blah, blah, blah.” At least our friend Rupert Murdoch takes a stand: he’s in a fine dungeon high dudgeon over SOPA. He supports the legislation and tweeted Saturday night:
“So Obama has thrown in his lot with Silicon Valley paymasters who threaten all software creators with piracy, plain thievery.”

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, has announced he is going to make the site black for 24 hours starting tomorrow as a visual protest of what government censorship could like like in an extreme form. Social media site Redditt plans to do the same; Google will probably use its page to send searchers to U.S. Senators’ and Representatives’ offices.

And so, “The fight is curiously nonpartisan,” as the latimes.com put it. And I’m in bed with Michele Bachmann.

As of 2 hours ago, The SOPA vote has been delayed (too many phone calls and emails, Congress?) but the Senate vote is still stubbornly set for January 24. Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s phone number is 202-224-3244. Sen. Al Franken prefers email messages. Just Google him. If Google’s still open.

——————————-

UPDATE: After a successful day of protests (and reading a discouraging number of tweets from young people nationwide that asked: WTFISOPA? and The internet is ending???????!!!!!!) I wanted to thank you all for a great discussion with this little treat — Hitler Reacting to SOPA. Enjoy.

MLK Day And The Pursuit of Happiness

Suggested manufacturer's retail price: $75,000/year.

Today’s blog tackles a simple subject, the secret of a happy life. Hey, it’s a holiday, so we’re going with an easy topic.

Almost everyone I know — conservative and liberal, wealthy and non-wealthy, spiritual and non-spiritual – would say the happiness of a life should be measured in emotional terms rather than financial terms. That is, they would say the key to a happy life is not to accumulate as much stuff as possible, but to accumulate more positive emotional experiences than negative emotional experiences. For example, a happy life is one that includes more joy, fascination and affection, and less anxiety, sadness and anger. Correct?

Despite this, many of us live our lives in a way that suggests that more money and more stuff is the secret to happiness. We work long hours away from things that give us happiness and subject ourselves to stressful work environments all, we tell ourselves, in pursuit of happiness.

Is that logical?

To a large extent, it is. So sayeth a 2010 Princeton /Gallup /Healthways study. The study tracked people’s emotional well being, or “the quality of a person’s everyday experience, such as joy, fascination, anxiety, sadness, anger and affection.” The study found:

“…as income decreased from $75,000, people reported decreasing happiness and increasing sadness and stress. The pain of life’s misfortunes, including disease, divorce, and being alone, is exacerbated by poverty. In other words, being divorced, being sick, and other painful experiences have worse effects on a poor person than on a rich.”

So, pursuing higher incomes does seem to lead to a happiness gain, because the day-to-day existence at higher income levels reduces overall sadness and stress.

But interestingly, the study also found:

“…emotional well being leveled off at $75,000/year. In other words, the quality of the respondents’ everyday emotional experiences did not improve beyond an income of approximately $75,000 a year; above a certain income level, people’s emotional well being is constrained by other factors, such as temperament and life circumstances.”

So for the 11% of the U.S. population earning personal incomes above $75,000/year, having a higher income does not lead to additional happiness gain.

(Side note: Interestingly, incomes above $75,000 ARE associated with a higher “life evaluation” or “a person’s thoughts about his or her life.” As the study’s authors concluded, “High incomes don’t bring you happiness, but they do bring you a life that you think is better.”)

Remember, the $75,000/year income tipping point identified by Princeton is an average. The precise tipping point obviously varies depending on each individual’s life circumstances. For example, the level may be higher if you have a lot of kids, a lot of debt, no familial financial safety net, or you live in a high cost community. But the important point for this discussion is that a point of diminishing returns does seem to exist where the pursuit of higher incomes no longer furthers the pursuit of happiness.

Today is the holiday celebrating the life of a man who said “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’” That seems like as good a day as any to contemplate where our personal income-happiness tipping point lies.

- Loveland

LIKE: Seven Rules and 10 Simple Steps for Social Media in Your Campaign

Rowdy friend and regular visitor Kelly Groehler’s new guidebook to using social media in political campaigns, LIKE: Seven Rules and 10 Simple Steps for Social Media in Your Campaign (in Politics, Business or Otherwise), is hot off the digital presses. Available now in paperback but later this month as an e-book, it’s dedicated to the premise that any candidate, cause or organization that ignores social media today does so at his/hers/its own peril.

And, P.S., relying on your son or daughter to run your social media campaign just ain’t gonna’ cut it.

So Groehler, while a 2010-2011 Policy Fellow at the University of Minnesota Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, joined three other researchers in studying the use of social media in the state’s 2010 gubernatorial race. Their conclusions drive a set of seven rules and 10 basic steps in how to begin using social media in your own campaign.

Independent candidate Tom Horner and campaign staffers for Republican candidate Tom Emmer and Democratic governor Mark Dayton provided candid background information to Groehler and her fellow researchers: Dave Ladd, president of RDL & Associates strategic consulting firm; Greg Swanholm, senior constituent advocate for U. S. Senator Amy Klobuchar and Bass Zanjani, deputy district director for U. S. Congressman Keith Ellison.

The key word in the work’s title, LIKE, reminds us that today’s internet stars user-generated content; positive response to that content can be your best campaign message precisely because it is not seen as political propaganda or one-way messaging. However, the flip of this proposition is equally as powerful: unflattering tweets, Facebook messages or YouTube videos can drive a negative force from which a candidate never recovers (think of the aptly-named Anthony Wiener).

LIKE is designed for the novice user of social media and thus, can begin the discussion of why social media matter, what investment of time and resources they will take (no, they’re not “free”) and where to begin in planning an effective template that incorporates social media with traditional media channels.

And the most important take-away of LIKE should be this: campaigns today really are conversations. They involve give and take, multiplied by 800 million members of Facebook.

Follow the LIKE effort on Twitter @LIKESEVEN10.

Citizens United Works? Current Controversy

Watching Current TV, trying to feed my politics addiction after MSNBC switches to prison programs (?!?!?).

Current TV, Al Gore’s cable endeavor, is still struggling, but it’s worth a look. There’s a program hosted by Cenk Uygur, called The Young Turks, that’s pretty cool. Not the usual aged establishment talking heads, but some young guys (all guys alas) who are pretty smart.

One, Ben Mankiewicz (who looked enough like Frank Mankiewicz, RFK’s press secretary, that I looked him up and yup, the guy’s his son and has worked in lots of media), said the eviscerating of Mitt Romney by candidates who aren’t getting many votes in the two primaries so far shows “Citizens United works.” Challenging idea. (Citizens United is the Supreme Court decision that allows PACs to spend unlimited money on campaigns, and most liberals look at it as a Chicken Little moment.)

Here’s the thesis that The Young Turks kicked around: The Republican establishment is afraid that all the attacks on Bain Capital will spill into not just the general election but the country at large, threatening their status as the rich guys who get to run the country. Their candidate, Mitt Romney, will assure the status quo — rich guys can keep running the country. And here are dead men walking, Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry, trying to torpedo the keeper of the status quo. Without Citizens United, Perry, Gingrich and Rick Santorum would have had to pack up their tents and slink home by now — most primary voters have said no thanks. But unlmited PAC money is keeping them afloat. And their little boats are firing away at Romney like Iranian speedboats in the Straits of Hormuz.

The establishment is saying get behind Romney, everybody. “And here are a few other billionaires saying ‘no way, we’re going to back who we want cuz we don’t like Romney.’” They’re not falling in line, and they’re allowed by Citizens United to prop up lame contenders like Newt and Perry.

“It’s speech, man,” Mankeiwicz said. Speech that contradicts the oligarchy’s dictum.

Hmmm. Uygur tossed the discussion to Sam Seder, who laughed and said, “I’m not so crazy about different sets of billionaires making these choices for us,” but he allowed that Mankiewicz’s was a point worth considering.

Thought-provoking. And that’s a rare treat in TV news and commentary these days.

Take a look at The Current. After his latest snit, apparently Keith Olbermann is coming back to Countdown. Jennifer Granholm, former Michigan governor, has a show, and Al Gore pops in by remote feed now and then (and my lord is he slow and boring too often). It’s one more increasingly worthwhile stop for political junkies.

– Bruce Benidt
(Image from Zimbio.com)

The Power of Words

Juggernaut. Inevitable. Commanding lead.

We’ll see tonight how inevitable Mitt Romney is. But when Andrea Mitchell called the Romney campaign a juggernaut two days ago, I squawked back to the TV — “He won by 8 votes in Iowa. He got the same percentage of votes as four years ago after running for four more years. Juggernaut?????”

Campaign reporting, especially with all those cable hours to fill, is usually just dogs panting after whatever squirrel’s running through the yard at the moment. Candidates (usually those who are behind) always say there’s only one poll that matters — the election. Romney is assumed to be inevitable because he’s polling ahead in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Florida, because he has a ton of money, and because his opponents are so lame. But things can change in a hurry — Romney’s lead is melting as I type — unless the media keeps broadcasting self-fulfilling prophecies.

Romney could have been labeled a failure after Iowa — four years, millions of dollars, no gain in votes or percentage, stuck at 25%, the majority of voters rejecting him. LBJ won the New Hampshire primary in 1968 with 49.5% of the vote to Gene McCarthy’s 42.4%. But the media called this a loss for LBJ — a sitting president nearly tied by an upstart senator with a bunch of kids campaigning for him. New Hampshire played a huge role in Johnson saying he wouldn’t run for reelection.

Iowa could have been called an embarrassing loss for Romney. His candidacy could have been called wounded. But instead, his 8-vote landslide kept an imaginary juggernaut rolling. I think this is irresponsible inaccurate reporting by the media.

We’ll see how the juggernaut rolls tonight.

New Hampshire has gotten interesting because of the power of words. President Obama hasn’t been able to capture people’s anger about what was done to the economy by speculators in any succinct way. It took a blogger to come up with “We are the 99 percent.” Hugely powerful because of its simplicity.

The New York Times ran front-page stories about Mitt Romney’s record at Bain Capital through November and December. The most comprehensive on Nov. 12, showed exactly what what Bain did in many cases — piled debt on the company, Dade International, killed 1,700 jobs, and left the company no option but bankruptcy. Bain took $342 million for itself. (How’s that for pay for performance?)

So Romney’s Bain record has been out there for anyone to see. Only in the last few days have Romney’s opponents started nailing him coherently for Bain. And it’s simple language that gains traction. “Predatory capitalism.” “Outsourcing jobs.”

And, from the master of invective, the “relentlessly positive” NastyNewt Gingrich, this gem in today’s Times: “Is capitalism really about the ability of a handful of rich people to manipulate the lives of thousands of other people and walk off with the money?” Pretty clear, pretty punchy. Better if he were more specific about “manipulate” — kill jobs, lower wages, cut benefits. (And how will any of these hypocritical weasels defend their opposition to effective regulation of the very behavior they are criticizing at Bain once they’re done smacking Mitt over the head?)

“Makes millions off killing jobs. Your kind of guy?” Simple bumper sticker.

Simple clear language — it works.

–Bruce Benidt
(Image from Politico.com)

Go Mittens, Go.

Post-Iowa the factoid that flashed more red and brighter than every other was this: Turn-out was barely 5% greater than four years ago. Call me crazy but I can make the argument that the press and pundit corps — always in need of something to cover and gas on about — is far more interested in the GOP primary circus than the Republicans themselves. After over a year of visits and six solid months of freak show mania, not to mention the $10-plus million Mittens Romney and Rick Perry alone dropped on Iowa media, the so-called rank and file, (in actuality the semi- and totally batshit) couldn’t muster any more anger, rage and enthusiasm than 6000 more people — out of 608,000 registered Republicans. Call it a “record turn-out” if you’re into the whole hype thing. But the percentages tell a much different story.

Since last Tuesday we’ve heard (too much) about the “Rick Santorum surge”, a sudden frothing movement which in the end presents a very odd man as viable competition for Mittens and a credible candidate for … President of the United States.

Please. Neither Santorum nor anyone else is going to get anywhere close to Romney and the nomination. As Robert Reich blogged today, Romney is if nothing else, an avatar for Citizens United.  In a moment when the imbalance of wealth and influence is more vivid than any time in maybe 100 years the Republicans are moving inexorably toward another very odd guy — palpably twitchy in his own skin — who is the walking talking embodiment of “the 1%ers”. Taken further, if the Democrats want to frame the campaign as a referendum on how Republicans have responded to the beat-down of the middle-class over the past decade they could not have invented a candidate more perfect than my guy, Mittens. (My nephew in Denver uses “Mittens”. I like it. It suggests cossetting and protection against harsh elements … with a dash of parental supervision.)

You want a sense of how “odd”? Read this live-on-the-plane report from The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank.

The divide between Santorum’s social conservative crowd and Romney’s “he might be able to beat Obama” crowd is stark … deep and wide. But the social conservatives, the anti-gay, you’ll-be-marrying-turtles, or going all “man on dog” and maybe polygamist to boot bunch has no standing in Romney’s Citizens United Super PAC wonderland. Santorum’s Biblically-directed tinfoil hat brigade wouldn’t even recognize Romney’s $500k per pop hedge fund Super PAC-ers as being of the same species … and vice versa.

This of course is old news. The inevitability of Romney has been established for months, despite all the bovine bloviation on cable TV. Likewise the stunning lack of enthusiasm for Mittens.

But as this thing gets serious (post the comedy candidates like Bachmann, Cain, Trump, Palin and, hell, Rick Perry) we are getting a much better feel for … the terms of the choice.

Despite three solid years of hyperbolic messaging not even the Republican base is convinced enough that Barack Obama is a Kenyan Muslim anti-christ to drop everything and spend two hours with their like-minded neighbors voting to stop the apocalypse. More significantly, with the economy showing some actual green shoots (Mitch McConnell has to get back to D.C. and stamp that crap out ASAP!) in terms of manufacturing and employment, Obama has every good reason to double down on, as I say, a referendum on the Republican Congress … the Congress that out-nothinged the Do Nothing Congress of Harry Truman’s era … at a time when more middle class voters than ever expected it to do something … other than obstruct and play sophomoric procedural games.

I say again; clear, visible, bona fide support for the plight and interests of the middle class will be the crux of the choice. Who can make the most plausible case that they’ve done everything they can?

Romney, though not a member of Congress, is a Central Casting caricature of the class that owns Congress. I see Karl Rove is delighted to see Romney set up so well. Rove, now arguably the country’s premier Super PAC salesman has to regard a Romney presidency as a kind of restoration for him and the whole crowd of hedgie-cronies who installed and sock-puppeted George W. Bush for eight years.

This particular choice, Obama (with his billions for Super PAC) or Romney presumes that the Republican social conservatives will allow themselves to be stuffed back into their sound-proof kennels, as they are every election cycle when the Republican money machine has finished exploiting them. Given Rick Santorum’s absolute fealty to the K Street powers that restored him to an upright and lucrative position after being destroyed in his Pennsylvania reelection bid, I can’t see him playing spearchucker for a third party.

Ron Paul, 76 years old and figuring he’s riding the biggest wave he’s ever going to get, is a whole other story. The social conservatives appear to be leery of the geezerly old doctor. Legalize heroin!?  But he has enough semi-anarchic, pot-loving, middle class college kids willing to rattle cages for him that he might just say, “WTF? It’s now or never!” (Lacking Paul’s fans — 21% — the Iowa turn-out would have been a complete face-plant for the party.)

At which point the geezerly doctor will get a call from one of Mittens’ and Karl Rove’s hedge fund guys offering to pay off all his campaign debts if he changes his mind … for health reasons, you understand, or to spend more time with his family.

The New Year — Beginning of the End?

Living on a porous limestone peninsula that hangs off the continental United States makes me feel both sheltered and vulnerable. I can feel distanced down here from the craziness that sweeps across the mainland — political, climatic, cultural — but I also feel nakedly exposed to the consequences of the environmental ignorance most of us cling to. Our politics and behavior show no sign that we’ll turn away from the disaster we’re piggishly driving toward.

2012, a new year. Same as the old year?

Lisa and I moved to Florida 15 months ago to have a brighter life — more sun, more light, more days wearing shorts. Less moaning about the state of the world. Less consumption of news, more attention given to birds, lush foliage and sunsets. And we’ve done well. Yes, we’re bringing in potted palms and covering plants tonight as there’s a freeze warning here north of Tampa Bay, but on Christmas Day I hung in my hammock in shorts and a T-shirt, listening to fish jump ten feet away. Most days the beauty of this state rises above its commercial tawdriness and shattered speculative economy. And most days I focus on the present wonder and grace of life, not the ever-approaching abyss.

A thoughtful and provocative book from Minneapolis’s Milkweed Editions, The Tarball Chronicles by David Gessner, looks with poetry, compassion and horror at how we’re raiding our future to feed our energy addiction. He poses the question — are we really willing to ransack our and our childrens’ environment to frack and drill and mountain-rape the planet so we can pull out the last dregs of fossil fuels? It’s like we’ve been drinking a wonderfully tasty malt, and now with the last half-inch melting in the bottom of the glass, are we really willing to sell our grandchildren, our health, our economy and our national security to slurp up that last half inch? Nobody in public life is talking seriously about where our next malt might come from, our grandchildrens’ malt, and nobody is planning. We’re just devising new and more-disastrous ways to go after that last half inch.

We bought our house in Port Richey while the Deepwater Horizon well was still spewing raw oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Our house is embraced on two sides by a saltmarsh and a tidal pond and channel that connects through the mouth of a tidal river directly to the Gulf. A rising tide could bring spilled oil into the mangroves and grasses that nurture fish and birds and shellfish, killing generations of wildlife. The fish, crabs, rays, herons, ospreys and bald eagles that are our next-door neighbors would all perish from a spill. The BP oil did not come ashore here. This time. Wells are still leaking in the Gulf, our energy addiction will demand more wells, and more disasters are inevitable. They will happen. Gessner’s book shows that we won’t know for years the full damage done to the fisheries of Louisiana. And those oiled marshes are food and habitat for migrating birds — so the BP disaster reaches to the loons that grace Minnesota waters in the summer and depend upon healthy Louisiana marshes when they snowbird south.

And nothing — nothing nothing nothing — is being done to change the demand for oil that is the ultimate cause of the Deepwater spill. And nothing — nothing nothing nothing — is being done to change the way we drill and frack and dynamite our landscape to get at the last half-inch of fossil fuel. None of the candidates gassing away in Iowa tonight has a long-term solution to move beyond fossil fuels, and nobody in Congress or the White House has the balls to lead us into a sustainable energy future. And — we all keep driving, sucking up obscene amounts of groundwater, generating trash, and hoping for the best.

The popular political answer to all problems? No new taxes. The latest tally of the cost of not investing in the common weal? News stories of sex ed classes cut (more pregnant teenagers make for a great future), streetlights turned off (light deters crime, but hey), and a 14% increase over 2010 in police officers killed on duty (budget cuts mean there are fewer cops for backup — we’ve dropped from 250 police officers per 100,000 people in 2008 to 181 in 2010, according to a Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics report.)

Oh gloom. Lighten up, Bruce. I have a wonderful fortunate life, full of friends and joy and love and beauty. But the world my nieces and nephews will live in? I fear for them.

At high tide, our garage is just a couple of feet above sea level here. Melting ice caps mean if I still live here in my dotage this place will be like Venice — I’ll be able to kayak into the ground level of our house. Convenient, in some ways.

On New Year’s Day my dear Lisa (who has talked for years about 2012 being the end of the Mayan Calendar’s Long Count, which is the end of the Mayans’ longest cycle of time but is interpreted by some to mean the end of time) woke up, stretched, oriented herself, petted the cat, and said, “Oh yeah, I forgot, this is the year the world ends.”

Happy end of the world, all. Reduce, reuse, recycle. And I should add for myself — relax.

– Bruce Benidt
(Photo of our backyard channel, oyster bar and tidal pond)

Ten Things That’d Go Down Today, if I Were King, God Damn It.

Eventually I lost track of how many “10 Best/10 Worst” lists I slogged through at the end of 2011. Suffice to say none of them covered the stuff that I consider critical to maintaining, A: A functioning democracy in our troubled times, B: The possibility of  victory in the eternal struggle between intelligence and bullshit-lubricated shilling, and C: My sanity.

Hence, my annual list of “Ten Things That’d Go Down Today, if I Were King, God Damn It.”

1:  Hear ye, hear ye … in our modern hyper-connected, Google-ized, information at the tap of a smart phone wonderland there is no reason — none at all — to but up with the astonishing bombardment of fact-free bullshit in what passes as “news” programming. Therefore and henceforth, all cable, satellite and broadcast programming purporting to be/marketing itself as “news”, be it “reported” or “personality driven” shall be placed on a 30 second delay. During that delay a “Truth Squad” of a half-dozen or so techno-geeks will run a check on all statements presented as fact. The results will run in a constant banner at the bottom of the screen. For example, when Sean Hannity says, “Barack Obama is a Kenyan Muslim with a secret proto-Socialist appeasement agreement with the Iranian ayatollahs”, the banner beneath him would read: “Nothing about this statement bears any resemblance to reality. As usual, Sean is completely full of shit.”

 2: The aforementioned “Truth Squads” would be paid for a by … A Tax on Perfidy.  Monetary fines adjusted in proportion to audience size at that moment would be channeled back into the system, steadily adding more and more fact-checkers. For example, if Brian Williams describes Mitt Romney as “an executive with an unequivocal history of job creation”, NBC would pay a fine of say one cent per viewer. Assuming an audience of 13 million, that’d be $130,000 into the fact-checker hiring kitty.

3.  Computing power would also be deployed in removing the single biggest obstacle to Congressional Gridlock … gerrymandered, incumbent-protected redistricting. All pertinent data would be fed into Watson the Monolithic Deep Blue Number Cruncher which after a few seconds of humming and blinking would spit out 435 new Congressional districts with no consideration whatsoever of protecting the careers of the incumbents who have signed the most oaths, pledges, vows and taken the most four-star dinners with Big Pharma lobbyists.

4:  Recognizing that Newt Gingrich has had at least one good idea … Lincoln-Douglas style debates … it is hereby ordered that the top 12 leaders of the two major parties submit themselves to a regular, free-form debate process … with the wild card that the debates be moderated by acknowledged experts in the subject matter at hand. For example, by the luck of the draw Eric Cantor would be required to appear in debate with say, Chuck Schumer, on the topic of government deficits, moderated by Joseph Stiglitz and Simon Johnson. Live. Two hours. No toilet breaks. No under-the-suit wiring. No microscopic ear buds.

5:  Jazzed by the success of the Tax on Perfidy funded Truth Squads, I hereby order a similar … Tax on Brain Sucking Inanity. Scrolling through the current 500 channel TV universe is one of the most profoundly depressing exercises imaginable. Cajun pawn shops. Swamp coots ‘rasslin’ alligators. Functionally illiterate yobs and gimbals shrieking insults and throwing drinks, talentless society bimbos with freakish hypo-plumped lips and no instinct for decorum carving up each other’s egos … and Sean Hannity. Lost tribes of the Amazon are better served by their signal drum media. Hence, another per viewer tax for every … tattoo, Botox injection, absence of teeth, faux hawk, catty knife-in-the-kidney remark and reference to anything Kardashian. Billions will accumulate in a single week.

6:  Similarly, based on the astonishing response to Your King’s mandatory debate decree, it is hereby ordered that as a condition of any candidate filing for state-wide or national public office they be publicly vetted by a similar panel of acknowledged experts in the fields of foreign policy, tax policy, economics, American history and, if necessary the difference between a Kleenex and a paper towel. Live. Two hours. Not that brains matter, of course. But the likelihood of a sheer public humiliation might at least spare us six months of Herman Cain, Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann.

7: In addition to a (far) more enlightened, skeptical and informed political media Your King hereby decrees on an infusion of similar virtues into the realm of …. business reporting. Since money is the only thing that matters, each public relations profile  masquerading as journalism must be off-set with a persistent stream of curiosity into any endeavour making disproportionate profits in any industry. Or … any industry making disproportionate profits amid recessionary collapse. Similarly the CEOs of such companies must submit themselves for public cross-examination by a panel of indisputably skeptical journalists. The phrase “shareholder value” is NOT an acceptable explanation for gross violation of labor and environmental laws.

8: The next variation on “Lost” — like this “Alcatraz” series for example  — must have an ending written and filed in a safe deposit box prior to the airing of the pilot episode. Granted, anyone with two neurons left in operating condition shouldn’t be watching network TV. But Your Royal Highness is not pleased — to the point of going all Henry VIII — on the next Hollywood slickster who sucks us in to a “Twin Peaks”/”X-Files”/”Lost” puzzle drama … without the faintest attempt to tie the loose ends together and make sense of years worth of tantalizing sub-plots. If not beheading, The King is seriously considering yet another tax.

9: Noting the $10 million spent on television advertising prior to the absurdly unrepresentative Iowa caucuses — which drive fewer low-information religious crazies to their caucus sites than fans to the average Ohio State-Michigan football game — The King correctly senses that this maelstrom of nutbaggery is a boon only to the Pizza Ranches and TV stations of Iowa. Unable to think up anything punitive enough for Pizza Ranch managers, the windfall income to (mostly corporate-owned) TV stations shall be (bitch) slapped with a 50% surcharge, or $5 million in this year’s cycle, which will be re-distributed to public schools for courses in critical thinking.

10:  Finally, Your King recognizes that royalty such as his is a residual quality from the Dark Ages … not that that bothers him all that much. But just because we wallow like happy swine in this rank sewer of Kardashian-Hannity-Swamp People-botox-wives-of-New Jersey effluent doesn’t mean we have to spend as much time as we will this year counting down to the end of the Mayan calendar. Bug-eyed jeremiads will be heard all about the land. But The King hereby decrees that he finds prophets of doom-for profit tedious … and usually in arrears on their taxes. Therefore they shall all be arrested by The King’s Bullshit Police and given the choice of either summary beheading (The King’s preference) or being caged in broken elevator for the next 12 months with a Kardashian and … Sean Hannity. (After a week the knaves will plead for the guillotine.)

That is all. Now, back to the fields with you.

 

 

Ask Newt If Ads Matter

In age of 24/7 cable news coverage and social media, in an age when the public is sick to death of political advertising, in an age of nifty ad-dodging tools like Hulu, YouTube and TiVO, political ads are now increasingly irrelevant. An anachronism.

Right? We’ve been hearing that for years now. For instance, a 2008 column in the Star Tribune by John Rash carried the provocative headline, “Ads’ influence falls away in a ‘message election,’” and carried a number of quotes from influential local and national experts supporting the headline’s assertion.

It’s not the first time you’ve heard the claim, and it’s not the last time you’ll hear it. But reports of the demise of the political ad have been greatly exaggerated.

Consider, for instance, Newt Gingrich’s freefall in Iowa.

Both Iowans and non-Iowans have been watching the same presidential debate coverage of Newt. Both Iowans and non-Iowans have been watching the same national news coverage of Newt. Both Iowans and non-Iowans have been listening to Limbaugh, Hannity and other nationally syndicated talk radio hosts opining about Newt and his rivals.

But a huge difference for Newt in Iowa versus the rest of the country is the anti-Newt advertising pouring into Iowa. Newt reportedly is getting hammered by negative direct mail ads, radio ads, TV ads, outdoor ads, and online ads. Iowans are seeing the ads repeatedly, but Americans as a whole are not.

It therefore is probably not a coincidence that Newt is polling at about 27.4% nationally, but half that (13.7%) in Iowa. Nationally, he is still in first place, but in Iowa he has fallen to fourth place. His trend line isn’t great in either Iowa or the nation as a whole, but in Iowa Gingrich has fallen faster and further.

Happy New Year to All of Our Rowdy Friends

Flickr image by Creativity103

Update on the Twitter Early Warning System (TEWS) Project

Readers may recall that back in October I started work on a research project to use Twitter as an early warning system for disasters, accidents, terrorist events and the like.  The notion is that in today’s hyper-connected world the first thing some of us do upon encountering an unexpected event is to Tweet about it and that in all but the most local of events, those Tweets will outrun any physical manifestation of the event.

The first key decision is to determine what set of keywords to use as trip wires.  As the first post indicated, I started out by looking for incidences of “WTF” and “what the fuck” under the assumption that those are the most likely terms used to express unpleasant, unknown surprise in our modern lexicon.  Similarly, I tested other broad terms such as “whoa,” “holy shit” and “what the hell.”

My conclusion is that the global background levels of “WTF” and its ilk are way too high to filter out the truly anomalous incidents from the overwhelming expressions of things like, “WTF? No Coke Zero again?”  ”WTF are you doing wearing that dress?”

That has led me to build a more complex but ultimately more useful search set around specific terms.  Using the close-to-real-time filtering of TweetDeck, I’m now tracking:

• “building shaking”
• “flash of light”
• “ground shaking”
• “hear gunfire”
• “hear sirens”
• “huge explosion”
• “huge noise”
• “incredibly loud”
• “lights in the sky”

I’m still getting false positives, of course, but the number is greatly reduced and some meaningful data is beginning to emerge (today’s very small earthquake is eastern Ohio/western Pennsylvania, for example, popped up on this search stream about an hour ago). This is very encouraging, but if anybody has ideas for additional terms, please throw them over the transom.

Next step is to find a way to map Tweets in real-time.  If anybody knows of an application that does such a thing, please let me know.

Happy new year to all.

- Austin

 

 

Bad Neighbor

First, it was Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty’s smack down in the Iowa Straw Poll, which prompted his premature evacuation.

Then it was Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann going from first to worst in the blink of an Iowa eye, followed by her Iowegian Chairman stabbing her in the back yesterday.

We Minnesotans have met our Waterloo, Iowa.

Iowa, oh Iowa. We’ve given you Minnesota’s very finest, and you’ve rejected them, for what? A farm subsidy hating Texan? A Bay Stater? Really?

We’ll grant you, our Governor is deadly boring, even to a citizenry that regards boring as a high virtue. And Bachmann’s act — Palin but dumber and meaner — is wearing thin on us too.

But still, we’re freaking neighbors. Does a 275-mile shared border mean nothing to you people?

Maybe it’s Floyd of Rosedale envy. Maybe it’s because we didn’t send enough buses of Minnesotans down to pay your Straw Poll ransom. Or maybe it’s because you’re tired of driving all the way up here only to see our Vikings, Twins, Wild and Timberwolves stink up the joint like an overflowing hog confinement in July.

But come on now, you still have the Food Court at the Mall of America, right?

Whatever it is, we just have to say, it hurts.

- Loveland

GOP Front Runner in Iowa Too Liberal For Democrats

In some ways, it makes perfect sense that Republican activists would be attracted to a candidate like Congressman Ron Paul. After all, Paul wants to get rid of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and eliminate most protections for consumers, the vulnerable and the environment. Ten years ago, those outrageous positions would have horrified Republicans. Amazingly, today they are much closer to mainstream Republicanism.

But other Ron Paul positions simply do not fit the Republican mold. In fact, they’re much too liberal for the Democratic Party. You’d never know it from much of the news media coverage, but Congressman Paul also:

• Opposes most military involvement (including the bin Laden raid);
• Wants to slash military spending;
• Wants to legalize prostitution;
• Opposes federal laws to ban gay marriage and abortion; and
• Wants to legalize marijuana, cocaine, heroin and all other drugs.

THAT is going to be the choice of the hawkish evangelical patriots that are the backbone of the Republican Party? A war hatin’, Pentagon slashin’, prostitution promotin’, gay toleratin’, baby killin’, coddler of drug dealers?

I can’t see it. But if it happens, it will spark the mother of all GOP Party civil wars, pitting the libertarian wing versus the religious right wing, the military industrial complex wing, the flag waving wing and the moderate wing. I don’t like Paul’s odds in that fight.

Ron Paul’s current appeal reminds me of Jesse Ventura’s appeal in 1998. He represents a cathartic middle finger to the establishment. But as many a disgruntled Ventura supporter can tell you, the problem with voting for the middle finger is that you’re buying the whole body, not just that one finger.

- Loveland

Have a Heaping Helping of “Classic Nostalgia”

Kurt Andersen is someone who has earned our attention. Largely responsible for the success of SPY magazine, a seminal confluence of the celebrity/media snark and satire zeitgeist in the mid-80s, Andersen went on to create the short-lived but equally iconoclastic website/magazine “Inside”. He’s published a couple critically acclaimed novels with a third teed up for next summer. He also hosts NPR’s weekly arts and culture program, “Studio 360″. He is, in short, one of the smart kids in the class. (He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard where, yes, he was an editor for the “Lampoon”.)

MPR’s Marianne Combs had Andersen on last Friday to discuss his article in the latest Vanity Fair, titled, “You Say You Want a Devolution”. The gist of it is Andersen’s view/belief that America’s creative culture is in a retrograde phase unlike anything in any generation since the industrial revolution.  Fashion? Nothing significant since the late ’80s. Architecture? Nothing nearly as bold and as emphatic a statement of this era as the Empire State Building and Grand Central were of their’s. Music? Lady Gaga is today’s recycled Madonna with weirder costumes. Film? What happened to that explosion of creativity in the early Seventies, when we had “A Clockwork Orange” and “Klute”.

Wait a minute? “Klute”? Jane Fonda as a high-priced hooker? I missed the explosive revolution in that one.

Reading the piece in its entirety it’s pretty obvious that there is no science here and the whole argument is a lot like a couple of football nerds arguing who is the better quarterback, Dan Marino or Aaron Rodgers? Basically it’s just Andersen firing off 1500 words to provoke an argument. But since it is Kurt Andersen there is an argument worth having. Especially when he wanders into how large-scale corporate research and marketing focuses — with high precision — on the most profitable demographic, pours on more of what they want most, re-branding it as “classic” and selling, both subtly and directly, the “nostalgia” appeal of the latest pop idol or re-imagined muscle car. The insinuation being that culture-rattling boldness, creativity of a kind that shocks and momentarily discombobulates audiences and before setting a standard for a generation kind of got co-opted by the giant conglomerates that control the marketing end of “art”.

In truth, callers into Comb’s show made several points more interesting and provocative than Andersen. But having covered media in one way or another since pretty much the dawn of Andersen’s retrograde era, 20 years ago, I have some sympathy for his argument. If pop music is in a static phase, with nothing anywhere (of any mass) having the impact of rock’s ’60s-’70s glory days, or Springsteen in the ’80s, or hip-hop in the early ’90s, the manipulations and decision-making of record execs, most answering to the shareholders of major media corporations are a bona fide subject for indictment. Expand that complaint to the numbing blandness of commercial radio through the past 20 years, a period most notable for gross consolidation and an ever-heavier reliance on corporate-generated play lists, voice-tracking “local jocks” and syndicated talent, and you see why something bold and unusual, much less revolutionary, rarely if ever cuts through the research-tested maximum-middle ground formula.

Predictably, as I drove west across sun-swept, snowless Minnesota to pick up Mom for a Christmas visit, I wondered how much big media marketing, looking to mine the rich ore of “classic” and “nostalgia” (essentially interchangeable concepts) has colored the past 20-plus years of political values.

Watching the strategies of all but maybe one of the Republican candidates trying to appeal to the party’s base in Iowa, I continue to return to the explanation that what the base wants most in its candidate is the person who sounds most like their favorite radio host –by that I mean pugnacious, scornful of everything liberal, supremely self-assured (and beyond direct intellectual challenge). Hence the brief spikes of Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry and  Newt Gingrich. Each of them delivered, or purported to deliver, the same kind of “classic nostalgia” that has been the essential, research-tested, carefully target-marketed mien of talk radio since the introduction of Rush Limbaugh — via heavily consolidated syndication — 20 years ago. They present themselves as avatars for classic American values — unequivocal patriotism (of a specific militarized variety), a 1950s vision of familial propriety (before a black middle class, single working mothers and, gasp!, kids with two mommies) and an intense resistance to change (especially if suggests social peerage with those previously regarded as of a lower class).

I’ve thought for some time that this particular election cycle represents a moment of apogee for this kind of talk radio mentality. It had a great deal to do with Gingrich’s glory moment in 1994, but it floundered as a result of overreach, Bill Clinton’s more adroit/less toxic-feeling political instincts and a booming economy. The “movement” recovered its balance — and as syndication and the development of FoxNews delivered the “classic nostalgia” message to every market in the land — asserted ever more sway over the only receptive party, the Republicans, until its crowning moment in 2010, hyper-galvanized by Kenyan Muslim Barack Obama hero-worshipped into the White House.

What we’re waiting to see now is whether that retrograde nostalgia mentality takes one more step next fall — not with a Mitt Romney winning the presidency as much as the nostalgist anti-revolutionaries capturing both houses of Congress and completely shutting off any avenue for … change.

 

Something About Mitt

One of the limitations of polling is that respondents sometimes give answers they think will please the interviewer, rather than answers that reflect their true feelings. They do this because they believe their true feelings may be at odds with societal norms. In the public opinion research world, this is referred to as “social desirability bias.”

For instance, a survey respondent who senses that religious tolerance is a dominant norm in society is less likely to want to admit to a stranger conducting a survey interview that Mitt Romney’s Mormonism makes the voter less likely to vote for Romney.

But an interesting thing happens when pollsters approach the issue from a slightly different angle. When Pew Research asked respondents to provide one word that comes to mind when they hear a candidate’s name, we get a glimpse of what is top-of-mind with voters.

Top-of-mind.

You might expect that terms dominant in Romney-related media coverage or ads might rise to top-of-mind status with voters, terms like “Romneycare,” “job creator,” “flip-flopper,” “front-runner,” “slick,” and “businessman.” After all, those topics and descriptors are dominant Romney-related topics in the campaign.

But they aren’t what sticks the most for the most for voters. The number one word that popped into voters’ minds, among both the general public and Republicans, is…

“Mormon.”

Keep in mind, I can’t recall a single ad airing about Romney’s religion. The subject has come up only fleetingly in debates, with Romney’s opponents largely shrugging off the issue. Yet “Mormon,” above all else, is what sticks in voters’ minds, while “Catholic” is not even on the public’s radar when it comes to Newt Gingrich.

This doesn’t tell us that the Mormonism is viewed as a negative by all or even most voters. But the fact that a) “Mormon” is voters’ dominant summation of Romney and b) Romney can’t seem to get get any traction with GOP primary and caucus voters leads me to believe that Mormonism is a bigger factor in this race than many want to admit.

- Loveland

A Moment of Our Time

As near as I judge, most of the regulars here at the Crowd are old enough to remember a time about 15 years ago when the Internet was a curiosity, the new thing you could access from the computer in the corner of the living room.  Using your dial-up 56K modem, you could access a mostly motley collection of mostly static, mostly unattractive academic, corporate and personal sites.  The marvel was not in the richness of the experience, but in the fact that you could it all.

Flash forward today and we are increasingly living big chunks of our lives on the Internet.  As I walked through the lobby of the health club this morning I saw half a dozen people, every single one looking at their iPad (4) or their smartphone (2). As recently as 2004, you could detect 1 wi-fi network from my living room; today, there are 19 in range.  In 1995, we owned exactly 1 internet-capable device; today we own at least 25 and almost certainly more as I can no longer keep track of how many devices we own that either have an ethernet port or a wi-fi chip in them.

Despite the near-ubiquity and the necessity (if it’s not quite as essential as the water and electricity in my home, it’s darned close and WAY above the satellite service, the landline phone and cellular service), it remains a mostly solitary endeavor.  We interact with the Internet in a mostly one-on-one way, just me and my screen. Because of this weird intmacy, I think we forget sometimes just how pervasive it has become.

Here’s a couple of graphics that put the Internet into a broader perspective:

 

 

I think my favorite stat is that in any given minute 2,000,000 of us are watching porn.

Pick your technology – writing, printing, electricity, modern plumbing, telephone, television, radio, CD-player, DVD-player, cellphone, penicillin, your favorite here -  and none of them has had the adoption rate of the Internet.  None of them – including electrification and plumbing because of the decades-long adoption curves – have been so wrenching – in ways good and bad – for society.  None have been so unregulated both in terms of public policy and personal oversight.

I hope we like how it all turns out.  Personally, I’m glad to be living in this era and I’m impatient for what comes next.

- Austin

 

 

 

A Few Questions on l’affaire Brodkorb-Koch.

It is a sick, schadenfreude-rich fascination, and I’m not (all that) proud of it. But the still unfolding Amy Koch-Michael Brodkorb drama/scandal, in its current state, leaves me asking more questions than it answers.

I have never met Koch and I recall only one conversation with Brodkorb, back in his hey day of running the “Minnesota Democrats Exposed” website. But both have well established reputations. Enough so that my first thought when told that Brodkorb was the likely suspect at the other end of the “inappropriate relationship” was to think, “This is as at least much about him as it is about her.” By that I mean, Brodkorb is very much the sort of guy who makes influential enemies and that it is entirely possible that Koch, her Senate Majority Leadership withstanding, is the collateral damage in a move to neutralize/destroy Brodkorb.

Before anyone tut-tuts about insinuating guilt on the part of a guy who has not been identified, much less charged with anything … please. Brodkorb was/is a guy who lived for press attention, preferably of the kind he could pre-formulate. Were he a bona fide innocent all he would have to do is answer one reporter phone call and say, “This is an outrageous slur! I have never had so much as an impure thought about Leader Koch! My lawyers dare you to suggest otherwise!”

But he hasn’t, and he won’t.

Instead he’s tweeting stuff like this … “… as he struggles to survive against his shadowy enemies and expose the truth, he doesn’t know whom he can trust.” (A reference to the John Travolta character in an old, over-heated Brian DePalma movie).

Since neither Brodkorb or Koch (who is also currently incommunicado with the public) are likely to clear the air anytime soon, here are a few questions I have should the day ever come when they stand up and explain themselves.

1: Despite comparisons to Bill Clinton toying with Monica Lewinsky, I’m struggling with the image of Leader Koch “seducing” or “exploiting” Brodkorb, the dewy-eyed staffer. In fact, call me a conspiracy-crazy, but knowing Brodkorb’s ambitions to be a player in making over the Minnesota GOP in the image of a take-no-prisoners hyper-partisan website/radio talk show, how likely is it that he was the “predator” here, drawing Koch into an episode of illicit bonding that enhanced his influence over her?

2: The GOP’s star chamber imagery, with a panel of solemn … white men … breaking the news after having passed judgment on Koch, has taken plenty of abuse for the heavy redolence of sexism. As it should. Republicans, and the Star Tribune editorial page, have commended the Council of Elders on the grounds that they acted expeditiously and with acceptable transparency. Republicans have been heard saying, “Can you imagine how bad this could have been had the Democrats found out first!”. To which I say, “No, I can’t … imagine how this could be worse.” Point being that in a normal world of routine office hanky panky — and nothing else — which goes on all the time, the Council of (Male) Elders would have met with Koch and said, “Knock this off and get this person out of your office”. Instead, the pressure exerted on Koch seems significantly greater than the offense required, to the point that she offered, on the spot, to resign as Majority Leader. Why the more heavy-handed than necessary squeeze on Koch? And don’t tell me that the state GOP is all that sensitive to mis-playing so flagrant a hypocrisy card via a “pro-marriage” tactician such as Amy Koch.

3: What has been the quality of the relationship between people like Geoff Michel, David Hann and other GOP leaders and Brodkorb? Knowing only a little about political egos, the elected have a certain hard-earned disdain for the unelected with ambitions for power. The experience of surviving the meat grinder of a public campaign gives the elected a cred mere “operatives” can only daydream about, and that disdain/cred expresses itself in summary retribution against over-reaching, unelected insiders … when it can. I would be astonished to learn that Hann, Michel et al were both comfortable and fully trusting of Brodkorb. In today’s zealot-mongering GOP game guys like Brodkorb are useful tools … until they’re not, or until as I say they forget their sub-servient status and overreach.

4: What are the terms of Brodkorb’s termination? Yes, all Senate employees are “at will” and can be dismissed at any time for any reason. But has anyone in the GOP hierarchy, whether elected or a major donor, arranged severance/compensation to Brodkorb? If so, did that come with a non-disclosure agreement?

Finally, the current GOP strategy, locking down Koch and Brodkorb and “moving on” is anything but transparent. If I were to guess I’d say we know less than half the full story of the motivations and intrigues here. I suspect the Capitol press corps feels the same … and is excited and tingly at the thought of being the one that delivers the full drama in all its tawdry glory.

Ham(line) Handed PR

Kudos to Star Tribune columnist Jon Tevlin for by far the best coverage of last week’s dispute about former GOP gubernatorial nominee Tom Emmer’s bid to become a professor at Hamline University.

In last week’s coverage, Emmer was claiming he had an informal handshake agreement, though not a contractual agreement, to teach at Hamline. Emmer maintained that Hamline later reneged under pressure from liberal faculty members.

From last week’s coverage, I couldn’t tell if Emmer was exagerating the firmness of the handshake agreement he and Hamline had actually reached. But in his Sunday column, Tevlin uncovered several Emmer emails that show the claimed Emmer-Hamline handshake was bonecrunchingly firm. There are unambiguous statements from Hamline leaders in those emails, such as “Tom Emmer is going to teach it.”

Tevlin did the by far best reporting on this issue, and he also did the best opining:

I have no idea if Emmer would be a good teacher. He’s certainly not known as an intellectual or deep thinker, but a lot of colleges are convalescent homes for retired or failed Democrats, so he’s certainly not a stretch. I’m guessing he’d give a lot of students the opportunity to hone their arguments, and there’s value in that. My two best professors in political science were a socialist and the then-head of the GOP. They both made me think, and that’s what education is about. Hamline could have handled this worse, but I’m not sure how.

Hamline didn’t break a contract, but it did reveal itself to be narrow minded. They should have let Emmer teach.

- Loveland

Signs That Vikings’ Poor Play May Be Impacting Stadium Push At Capitol

For a long time, I’ve maintained that the quality of the Vikings’ play has almost no impact on the team’s push for a state subsidy to finance a new stadium. But recent developments at the State Capitol are causing me to reconsider that opinion:

• Following yesterday’s twelfth loss of the season, Vikings stadium bill is now being considered as part the Omnibus Homeless Assistance Act.

• During a recent heated exchange on the House floor, a legislator was heard to be bitterly calling his opponent a “Loadholt.”

• During this morning’s opening prayer in the House, firebrand preacher Bradlee Dean referenced Vikings’ quarterback “Muslim Ponder.”

• A member of the Capitol press corps asked the staffer allegedly in an “inapporpriate relationship” with Senator Amy Koch, “who taught you pass defense, Leslie Frazier?”

• The Wisconsin Legislature reportedly has offered to pay for 100% of the new Vikings stadium, to keep the Vikings in the Packers’ division.

• To finance their stadium push, Ramsey County is now suggesting a tax on surging local sales of Prozac and Wellbutrin.

I’m not a lobbyist, but these do not strike me as good signs for the Vikings.

- Loveland

My Christmas Wish

It’s not every year I get what I want for Christmas, but this season is looking pretty good.  After watching the 33rd Republican debate this evening I’m extraordinarily optimistic that the GOP is going to tie itself into knots well into 2013 over who it’s nominee will be.  And, as an extra-special “I must have been a REALLY good boy” present, there’s a fair chance that at the end of the melee, the last one standing will be…Newt Gingrich.

Oh, please, please, please.  I promise I’ll walk him and feed him and you won’t have to do anything!

Newt Gingrich as a nominee would make Nixon/McGovern, Johnson/Goldwater, Bush/Dukakis and Reagan/Mondale all look like cliffhangers.  Watching him tonight twist and turn on the spit of the legal definition of “lobbying” was as much fun as watching Bill Clinton try to parse “is.”  And, that’s just the easy stuff.

But…I know I shouldn’t get my hopes up.  Santa told me I won’t get everything on my list. I’ll be happy with a long, drawn-out primary season.

Romney is toast in Iowa, especially after tonight’s debate where he failed – didn’t even try, really – to knock Gingrich off-stride.  That means he’s coming out of Iowa 3rd or maybe even 4th.  If he’s lucky, he’ll win New Hampshire – barely.  He’ll get kicked again in South Carolina but – unless he’s collapsed completely – he’s got a firewall in Florida.  That gets us through the end of January with a grand total of – wait for it – 115 delegates awarded.

It takes 1,144 delegates to get the nomination.

The earliest somebody could claim the nomination is mid-March but realistically it will be much later because all of the state contests in March award delegates proportionately (versus winner-take-all).  That means we could get to April or even May with nobody having a clear majority of delegates.  By the end of March, when 1,325 delegates will have been awarded, we could have one candidate with 600 or so (let’s say Romney), another at 400 (Gingrich) and some others splitting up the rest (Paul with a couple hundred, Perry with some).

After March, though, the contests include winner-take-all events so it could wrap up in April if somebody gets some momentum.  Or…it could go on until May or…the Holy Grail of American politics…take us to a brokered convention in August in Tampa.  Unlikely in the extreme, but possible.

Just what I’d love under my tree.

- Austin

 

PS – Correction: not all Republican primaries and caucuses are winner-take-all after April 1; they’re just prohibited in March.

Minnesota’s “Fair Share” Stare Down

In a Star Tribune interview last week, Governor Mark Dayton said he would continue to fight to make Minnesota’s tax code more progressive, to ensure the wealthy pay their “fair share.”

Since the mainstream media often limits itself to journaling the predictable partisan ping ponging – “Democrats cheered, Republicans jeered” — it’s worth a quick look at the substance behind Dayton’s assertion.

Of course, “fair share” depends on individual values. To me, “fair share” means wealthy Minnesotans should pay a slightly higher percentage of their income to support their community than middle and lower income citizens. Not 50% more than the poor and middle class, but something like 5% more.

I realize not all of my fellow Minnesotans share that viewpoint. But judging from the polls finding overwhelming support for increasing income taxes on the wealthy, I’m assuming that for the majority of Minnesotans “fair share” means the wealthy should at least pay a proportion of their income in taxes that matches what the non-wealthy pay. As this chart shows, even that minimum fairness threshold is not being met in Minnesota:

The Creator and Me

Frank Luntz: Privilege Creator.

GOP pollster Frank Luntz is the genius who helped shift Republicanspeak from “inheritance taxes” to “death taxes,” and dramatically change public support as a result. You see, “inheritance” sounds unearned and aristocratic to the masses, while taxing death sounds outrageously insensitive and unfair. Score!

Similarly, at the behest of his wealthy clients Luntz changed Republicanspeak from “oil drilling” to “energy exploration,” “global warming” to “climate change,” and “health care reform” to “government takeover of health care.”

Is Luntzian linguistics Orwellian? In a 2007 interview with National Public Radio’s Terry Gross, Luntz embraces his inner Big Brother:

“To be ‘Orwellian’ is to speak with absolute clarity, to be succinct, to explain what the event is, to talk about what triggers something happening… and to do so without any pejorative whatsoever.”

Now Luntz is urging his Republican clients to repeatedly use the term “Job Creators” whenever referring to the wealthiest Americans. Mr. Luntz seeks to focus Americans’ attention on the 1%’s trickledownedness, rather than it’s gawdy and growing wealth.

Brilliant! After all, in the midst of a sluggish recovery no one wants to stand in the way of “job creation,” so this turn of phrase is getting Luntz’s wealthy clients exempted from debt reduction sacrifice. (“Sacrifice,” incidentally, is a bad bad word Luntz is urging Republicans to ban. If only Churchill and FDR had been so clever.)

This whole business got me to thinking, “if I could afford to hire old Frank Luntz, what could the wunderkind wordsmith do to get ME exempted from sacrifice?

The Bully Pulpit, Republican Style

A majority of Americans support:

* Stem cell research (77% support);
* Gay marriage (51% support); and
* Keeping abortion legal in some form (77% support).

So why are Republicans falling all over themselves to severely limit or ban stem cell research, gay marriage and abortion? Here’s why:

The best thing that could happen to the Republican Party would be for their nomination/tent revival process to end as soon as possible. Because the longer the Republicans evangelical arms race drags out and escalates, the more the eventual nominee will look like a preacher instead of a President. That sells in Republican primaries, but not with moderate swing voters in the General Election.

- Loveland

Self-Mutilation Nation?

Two common threads that runs through media coverage are this: 1) Conservatives mostly pay for public goods, while liberals mostly use public goods. and 2) Americans are driven by self-interest.

But Minnesota 20-20 and the noon-partisan Tax Foundation are the most recent groups to point out a phenomenon that calls both pieces of conventional wisdom into question. They looked at states that are net givers, or states that pay more in federal tax than they get back in federal benefits, versus states that are net receivers, or states that pay less in federal taxes than they get back in federal benefits.

One of the most curious things about modern American politics is this: For the most part, the states that receive the most net government benefit are the least supportive of funding government, while the states that receive the least net government benefit are the most supportive of funding government.

In other words, giver states, like Minnesota, usually vote to give more government support, to their financial detriment. At the same time, receiver states, such as Mississippi, usually vote to give less government support, to their financial detriment. It’s the opposite of what you would expect, if self-interest were driving voting decisions.

Which leads me to wonder, is America a nation of altruists, or self-mutilators?

- Loveland

Play That Funky Trump Card.

If you can get past Rick Perry — in his ranch coat — accusing Barack Obama of waging “a war on religion”, the most ludicrous and self-debasing storyline in the “Celebrities Gone Wild” circus of Republican presidential candidates (right now) is the dilemma of whether to appear on Donald Trump’s debate, a week before the Iowa caucuses. So far only Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum are in. Perry is saying he’ll be on a bus tour — in Iowa, where Trump will descend to moderate the “debate” and then, he says, endorse a candidate. Perry doesn’t know if he can work it in. Traffic in Iowa, you know, can be a bitch.

Mitt Romney, advised by the likes of Karl Rove to stay away, first bravely declared he would not be able to make it … then apologized to Trump for any perceived disrespect. Michele Bachmann, who has made several pilgrimages to the Trump Tower suites (without raising even a breath of scandal, odd considering Trump’s repeated pronouncements of himself as one of the greatest lovers in modern history), is now concerned about this endorsement business. Trump called her a “worker bee” the other day, which is kind of a long ways from endorsing the next queen.

In normal, healthier times the spectacle of major party candidates … for President of the United States, not Chippewa County commissioner … truckling and showing obeisance to a Page Six reality TV personality would be the lowest depths of sketch comedy absurdity. (Let’s imagine George H. W. Bush, Jack Kemp and Bob Dole publicly soliciting the endorsement of Jerry Springer.) But’s where the post-pride modern GOP has delivered itself. Donald Trump matters.

But why? Unlike Grover Norquist, who is the public face for serious, undisclosed money that can and has wreaked havoc on Republicans who violated his anti-tax pledge, all Trump can do is phone in to Howard Stern or Sean Hannity and say nasty, dismissive things about you, specifically that unlike him you’re a loser.

I am not being facetious when I say it may be worth factoring in the pop-cultural touchstones of the Republican base to understand both the influence of Donald Trump and the re-re-re-surgence of Newt Gingrich.

A consumer survey earlier this week tried to identify the entertainment TV-watching preferences of people of different political persuasions. The distinctions between lefties and righties could not be more stark.

Liberals gravitate to stuff like “30 Rock”, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, “Saturday Night Live”, “Cougar Town” and … “Masterpiece Theater”. No big surprises there, right? Liberals can’t get enough snark and irony.

Conservatives on the other hand really, really like … reality TV. Satirical farce holds no appeal. Their faves? “The Biggest Loser”, “The Bachelor”, “Dancing With the Stars”, “Swamp Loggers”, “Man vs. wild” and, believe it or not, one PBS show in particular, “This Old House”.

So what’s the connecting tissue? Well, a significant part of the appeal of reality TV is the audience identifying with the contestants, ordinary people competing for … self-renewal (“Loser”), acceptance and bonding (“Bachelor”), acclaim for otherwise hidden talent (“Dancing”), recognition for facing danger (“Loggers”), primal survival (“Man vs. Wild”) and self-sufficiency/respect for tradition (“Old House”).

In a world like this, mated with previous studies laying out conservatives’ comparatively more active response centers for authoritarian leadership, a guy like Trump matters. There may be a flutter of suspicion that he is over-inflating his resume. But gosh, he has big buildings (and casinos!) named after him and he really truly is the guy who fires people on network TV. He must have something going on. Enough that rather than spit coffee through your nose when he says he’s disappointed Obama hasn’t called him for advice, you’re inclined to think that’s not such a bad idea. Trump gives advice on TV every week, so why doesn’t Obama call him and ask how to out-bluff the next tinpot dictator? Why is Obama so proud? Is he afraid of Trump?

Gingrich and Trump have a lot in common. Both are in no small part products of their shameless willingness to sell themselves — to a certain credulous market segment — as not just authorities on every manner of cultural complexity, but the ultimate authority. And in a world where the singular maxim of advertising — repetition — remains indisputably true, they say it so often, so convincingly and without even the slightest tremor of doubt that it settles in … with certain psychological sub-set of the public.

I still say Gingrich’s appeal to the base is less a factor of their “distrust” of Romney for all his comical pandering, but rather his unwillingness/inability to present himself as the bold authoritarian they expect their leaders to be. Romney is incapable of bald-faced self-glorification. He has no ability to project an air of omni-authoritativeness, like a successful talk radio host, or Donald Trump.