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

The War on Differentness

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

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)

• 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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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)

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)