“With liberty and health care for all.”

The House of Representatives is within minutes of having its members vote on the Health Care bill — H.R. 3962. As could be expected, most Republicans see the bill as a loss of freedom for citizens and too expensive ($1.2 tillion during the next decade, they claim.)

But Most Democrats see the bill as an attempt to right a longtime wrong whereby this, the greatest country in the world, has allowed a system to grow where quality health care is just for those who can afford it. To hell with everyone else.

I think of my neighbor’s 2-year-old grandson who was just diagnosed with cancer. His treatments are costing approximately $10,000 per week. How would you afford his life-saving care? Today 62% of bankruptcies are caused by health care bills.

Michele Bachman just addressed the floor wearing a Hawaiian lei around her neck..swear to God. (She also invoked God during her speech.) Which got me to thinking, which side would Jesus vote with?

We must pass this bill.

It’s the right thing to do.

And we’re going to do it.

Ten minutes and counting…

Signs of the Times

All photos from Rep. Bachmann's anti-health reform rally yesterday. Source: Huffington Post

A Developing Tragedy…

The first reports from Fort Hood are chaotic but are coalescing around a couple of truly horrific numbers – 12 dead, 31 injured in a shooting on the U.S.’s largest military installation.  Now comes word that the one of three possible shooters is Army Major Malik Nadal Hassan, age 39 or 40.

There is so many things we don’t know about this situation, but there’s enough true weirdness in the little bit that’s already been put out to make an old crisis guy wary of jumping to any conclusions on who might have done what in this situation. I can almost guarantee that most of what we think we know now is incorrect, incomplete or miscontextualized.

As the media is once again demonstrating, the rush to judgment, the need to speculate and hypothesize in order to fill air time is irresistable.  They are helped in this by a legion of talking head “experts,” “consultants” and “witnesses.”  We haven’t seen much of the latter, but that’s because the base is on lock-down and you’d have to be truly crazy reporter to try to breach that perimeter right now.

There’s lots of ways this incident could have ramifications far beyond the terrible toll already paid.

Say a prayer if you’re so inclined.

UPDATE: True to form, it turns out facts as basic as the whether the alleged shooter is alive or dead turn out to be wrong.  Amazing.

- Austin

Whither Obama?

Did yesterday’s election tell President Obama to go more to the right or more to the left? Spinners are making the Arachnid Hall of Fame these last 24 hours. Obama’s done, the Right will Rise Again. Or, these were local elections and they were about the individual candidates and blahmeblahblah. Or, the votes show that Obama needs to go more to the left.

Of course, we see what we want to see. Liberal Air America’s Bill Press was crowing, with many callers agreeing, that the election should tell Obama to be Obama. Stop tacking toward the center, hitch up your pants and make the change you talked about in the election. I think this is a creative take on the elections — and it may be true that that’s what many voters and non-voters are feeling. I am. I want to see more, and more-radical, change. That is what I voted for. As an analysis by Peter Baker in The New York Times said, “(Obama) will have to decide how much of the political capital earned in Grant Park (a year ago when he was elected) he will expend to push a nation outside of its comfort zone.” I want more pushing.

Many are arguing that the switch of many independents from voting D to voting R shows a rejection of Obama’s approach. Could be. Independents who think Obama is too centrist aren’t likely to have voted for Republicans. They’re more likely to sit it out — and many people who voted for Obama a year ago sat out this election: Blacks, the young, suburbanites, voters without college degrees and voters with family incomes of less than $50,000, according to Dan Balz of the Washington Post. Could be that many in these groups want to see more progress on getting affordable health care, on protecting our economy and jobs and national security from the predations of Wall Street speculators (wherever they live and work), on changing the rules of the game from being rigged for the rich, and on and on.

A lot of Obama voters stayed home yesterday. What does that tell the president? I haven’t yet seen any analysis that goes beyond the expected spinning. What’s your view, Crowd?

– Bruce Benidt

Kingmaker’s Club Republicans

Governor Pawlenty loves to lecture Repbulicans that they mustn’t only be Country Club Republicans, but must also strive to be Sam’s Club Republicans. It’s a savvy attempt to win the votes of the all-important Buys Charmin By the Cubic Yard Moms.

Well recently Minnesota’s Governor in absentia has also been acting like a Kingmakers Club Republican. Not long ago in upstate New York, former Governors Sarah Palin and Pawlenty swooped down from their respective campaign jets to annoint Conservative Party congressional candidate Doug Hoffman, and evict Republican Party candidate Dede Scozzafava from their famously big tent. The Republican Scozzafava was charged by Pawlenty and Palin with the high crime of being politically moderate.

The Kingmaker’s Club didn’t have an auspicious start. The Pawlenty-deposed Republican candidate pulled out of the race, but then threw her support to the Democrat. The Democrat then defeated the Pawlenty-blessed candidate, the first time a Democrat has been elected to Congress from this rock-ribbed Republican district since 1850.

Oops.

But you do have to hand it to Pawlenty. The wannabe President finally managed to do something President Obama can’t seem to do – elect a congressional Democrat.

- Loveland

IRV Votes and He’s Kinda Rank

Chalk this up to me being an old fuddy-duddy, a conservative, but I voted today in Minneapolis using the instant-runoff ranking, and it felt stupid to me.

I wanted to be interviewed by somebody — newsies were interviewing voters about the new ranked-choice voting, and most of the comments were about whether it was clear or easy — because I wanted to say “It felt stupid.”

It felt like a toy ballot. It felt like I was voting for American Idol. (My wife points out I have no idea how voting for American Idol works — which is true — and I point out that I never need facts or information to form an opinion.)

Most of the arguments for instant-runoff voting seem to be about making the process easier. Well, I’m not sure “easy” should be the highest criterion for civic participation. With IRV we don’t have to have primaries. What’s wrong with primaries? They’re scrappy, they’re small, they’re closer to the voters. I have this nagging feeling that IRV is about making democracy more like fast food, more like a TV reality show, easier to vote people off the island. Ick.

And any voting scheme that needs a flow chart feels to me like Chad hanging around with Ponzi.

And, as with many of the initiatives in California, the land of the “Cool, good idea, man, like let’s make it a law,” there are unintended consequences lurking beneath this cool idea. California has been dying since Prop 13, and each election in la-la land is packed with weird initiatives and propositions, making an election something like a political argument in a crowded bar. With IRV, we won’t know the outcome of some elections for weeks. When there is an opportunity to vote for more than one person, as with large boards and bodies, we vote for a first, second and/or third choice. I want to give first-place votes to two people, not give a first to one and a second to another. It diminishes the impact, the value, of affirmative votes for two people — these two people both are my choices to be on the board.

Enough. I’m just suspicious of easy democracy. I know, with ranked choice voting Tim Pawlenty might not have become governor, and W might not have won (air quotes around won) in Florida. Good argument. But I just think ranked choice voting feels like voting for homecoming queen.

Saint Paul disagrees — voters there chose IRV today, one cycle behind Minneapolis.

What do the rest of you think? How was it for you, dear?

– Bruce Benidt

In the Arena, At Last

Republican President Theodore Roosevelt once described what it is like to stick your neck out in the brutal world of political communications:

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”

(Our guy T-Roos was a tad melodramatic, dontcha think?)

Well starting today, congressional Republicans will now find out what it is like to be “in the arena” when it comes to the biggest legislative cage match of our lifetime, the debate over national health care reform. Today, Republicans have offered their long-awaited alterative, that reportedly has (drum roll please):

SECURITY. No ban on corporations rejecting people with pre-existing ailments.

AFFORDABILITY. No option to buy into an insurance exchange to make insurance more affordable.

UNIVERSAL COVERAGE. No requirement to buy insurance, and therefore nothing moving us to universal coverage.

COST CONTROL. No option to buy into a Medicare-like program.

The Republican alternative does include malpractice limitations, a provision to allow sale of insurance across state lines and a ban on caring for illegal aliens, which reportedly is written into the bill in all CAPS with three exclamation points.

It hasn’t been easy for congressional Democrats to stick their neck out on this issue. Now Republicans, at least for a short time, get to find out what it’s like to be “in the arena.”

- Loveland

A Long (But Easy) Report on Web Analytics 101

I attended a conference of the Online News Association in San Francisco last month and heard USC Annenberg lecturer Dr. Dana Chinn present a good session on “finding meaning in the metrics” of Web analytics. (For those of you who are experts in Google Analytics, like my friend Jeremy Powers, this post is not for you. However, I will welcome all corrections. This post is for us beginners.)

Chinn began her presentation explaining some of the basic terms — and misunderstandings — used in Web metrics. For example, she started with the simple proposition: “Unique Visitors > Visit Websites > Generate Page Views.” Seems fairly straightforward, doesn’t it? But, as Chinn, explained “unique visitors” are actually “unique computers.” And therein lies a problem.

If one person accesses your company’s Website at home, then at work, and later from a hotel computer, that will count as three unique visitors. But, if one computer is used by four people (say, in a school) that will count only as one unique visitor.

Because of this, “unique visitors” can easily be over- or under-counted. Thus, Chinn pays little heed to these reports in and of themselves. As she put it: “So what?”

Ironically, publishers who are struggling to find homes online like visitor stats because they are comfortable to understand; they look like circulation figures from the ABC. But some online advertisers have become hip to the reality of these measures as have those who are calculating sales valuations of newspapers.

Now, on to “visits.” These aren’t as easy to find meaning from as they’d appear, either.

A visit is a period of activity separated by at least 30 minutes of inactivity. So, if a “visitor” clicks into your site at 1 p.m., surfs there for 20 minutes and then leaves the site, it counts as one visit. If that same “visitor” clicks into your site at 1 p.m., stays for an hour, leaves the computer for 29 minutes and then comes back to your site for one hour, that still will only counts as one “visit.”

But, if that visitor comes to your site at 1 p.m., visits for an hour, leaves for 31 minutes and then returns to your site, it will count as two “visits.”

With these caveats in mind, Chinn’s best advice was when she suggested that instead of relying only on the “counting” techniques, we try to use these measures to determine the level of engagement our site’s metrics suggest between us and “the people formerly known as the audience,” as Dr. Jay Rosen of NYU has dubbed them.

For example, try calculating the visits per weekly unique visitors. That could suggest if visitors are coming to your site with the frequency you need to build loyal relationships or not. Is your content engaging enough, she asks, that someone would want to visit more than two or three times per week? Hard to believe, I say, but the answer may just well be: “Honestly, no.”

Or, calculate page views per visit by week. When visitors arrive at your site, are they engaging with its content? Or do they land and then “bounce,” i.e. leave? Can you think why?

Maybe they didn’t like what they saw. Or didn’t find what they thought they would. Or couldn’t find what your site had “promised.”

Using metrics this way, I think, is both the logical and proper extension to help you evaluate the relationships you’ve now developed through blogs and other social media sites.

You can find a summary of Dr. Chinn’s presentation on SlideShare.

Why The Lack of Mac-like Attacks?

One of the most profound paradoxes of American politics is that citizens love to hate negative political ads, yet negative ads persist, because the same consumers that hate them are consistently persuaded by them.

If negative ads work so well for bottom-line driven political consultants unselling the competitors’ politicians, it would seem bottom line-driven corporate marketers would use similar tactics to unsell the competitors’ widgets. So why, for instance, aren’t the makers of Toasty O’s attacking the makers of Cheerios for downsizing package sizes while not lowering prices? Why isn’t Best Buy attacking on-line competitors for shipping costs and customer service hassles?

A few commercial advertisers have made heavy use of attack ads, though I’m sure they’d object to the use of that unsavory term. For instance, MacIntosh has the ubiquitous “I’m a PC/I’m a Mac” campaign, which features affable and laughable attacks, but attacks all the same. In ad after ad, Mac Personified attacks PC Personified with as much vigor and verve as McCain and Obama attacked each other on the campaign airwaves.

And just as it worked for Carville and Atwater, it has worked for Mac. Mac market share, while still the relative size of a pimple on Bill Gates’ prosperous posterior, has increased dramatically during the run of these ads. And the ad industry has applauded, giving Macintosh and its ad agency a Grand Effie, which is given to the most effin’ successful ad campaign of the year.

So if corporations are so bottom-line driven, why don’t we see more attack ads in commercial advertising?

- Loveland

Obama Wrong on Fox, Right on Journalists’ Shield Law

The Obama administration has gone one for two on issues with the media recently — and it’s gotten the most important one right.

I think they’ve muffed it on Fox — good lord, grow a thicker skin and don’t give those twerps the satisfaction of successfully picking a fight with you. Cable shows draw less than a million people — let Fox stew its viewers in their own juices, give them access and don’t get in a pissing contest with them. Of course Fox is biased — all news is biased. Get over it.

But on a shield law, the Obama administration has come down with a surprisingly adult position. The administration, working with the senate, is recognizing the importance of leaks in the public’s ability to learn about what’s going on inside government, and is willing to help protect journalists who want to protect anonymous sources.

From The New York Times Oct. 29 story:

Under the proposed agreement, a so-called media shield law would allow federal judges to quash subpoenas against reporters if they determine that the public interest in the news outweighed the government’s need to uncover the leaker – including, in some circumstances, disclosures of classified national security information.

After 9/11, national security became an excuse — perhaps understandable — for all kinds of bad policies and ideas. Governments almost always want to clamp down on people who disagree with them, and people inside the government who anonymously talk to reporters can be seen as treasonous, and the reporters who give them voice can be seen as harming the country. In time of war, the adage goes — even an endless war against terrorism — the first casualty is truth. So someone leaks that the CIA was told by the vice president to change its analysis so that the agency’s evidence better fits the administration’s conclusion, and the leaker is seen as the person who is harming the country.

Earlier on, the Obama administration had listened to intelligence agencies and prosecutors who said leaks can do tremendous harm, and the administration was leaning toward being more closed on this issue. Credit New York Senator Charles Schumer with finding some middle ground that helps protect the public’s right to know.

It’s easy to be for open government when you’re not the government. Then, when you are in power, you start believing that you really know what’s right for the country and you shouldn’t be questioned. It happened to LBJ, and it certainly happened to then-president Dick Cheney. So far, at least, Obama hasn’t been drinking his own Kool Aid on this.

Reporters should be able to protect their sources. In many states, including Minnesota, law enforcement has to exhaust all other avenues of finding out about a crime before they can ask a reporter to give up a source on information about the crime. Under this shield law proposal the administration is part of, a judge can decide that a reporter should not have to give up his or her source. At least that takes the decision away from the administration or a prosecutor. And that safeguards reporters and their sources to a considerable extent. Judges will still make some bad calls, and some reporters wills still choose to go to jail rather than reveal their sources, but at least the instincts of the Obama administration are still, so far, on the side of the people the government serves rather than just on the side of the government. That’s rare.

Kudos to Sen. Arlen Specter, who said, “We still get most of our information from investigative journalists. If you can’t protect sources, there is a lot of public corruption and private malfeasance that will go undetected and unpublished.”

The Times also reported that “The proposal would also extend coverage to unpaid bloggers engaged in gathering and disseminating news information.” This is a big deal, as there are fewer and fewer paid journalists all the time. While most bloggers, like TSRC, don’t do any real reporting, there are some who do actually go out and dig up information. They should be protected. Anybody writing or broadcasting should be protected, even if they aren’t staff journalists.

We need people on the inside who are willing to provide information to watchdogs. Better if those whistle blowers do it openly — but that’s a lot to ask when careers can be ruined. The public needs the protection this proposed shield law would give. It’s not about protecting reporters — it’s about protecting us. We the people. We need to know.

– Bruce Benidt
(Image from World Press Freedom Day)