Wednesday, November 14, 2012
The post in which this week's media obsession leads me to a brief rant
After a sordid week in the news I would like to state for the record that I have as little interest in the sex lives of our heterosexual soldiers as I have in the sex lives of our homosexual soldiers. And I find none of it to be particularly relevant to the job at hand, fighting and winning wars.
I know that the military has enjoyed a completely chaste reputation throughout all history -- especially sailors on shore leave, renowned for their tendency to attend a brief church service before sipping a cup of tea and returning to their ship -- but I find it hard to fathom that in 2012 A.D. we are tossing generals overboard because of what they're doing with other consenting adults. It's hard enough to find a good general, so frankly I don't care if he spends his off-hours hanging by his ankles from the ceiling at Mistress Crunchita's House o'Pain as long as he's doing a good job with his chunk of the war.
This seems a good time to remind everybody that by what seems to be our new standard, FDR and Eisenhower were unfit to lead us during World War II. I'm just as happy we didn't throw them overboard for the second string.
Here's what I think these straying generals deserve: a few months on the couch, some frosty stares from their wives, and a few jokes at their expense. (Yes, it is fair that "Hey there, hot stuff, want to write my biography?" is now America's favorite new pickup line, finally knocking, "Hey there, hot stuff, let's hike the Appalachian Trail," off its lofty perch.)
I will also admit that I have no idea what to make of the shirtless FBI guy, but as always with these sorts of things, it's mostly a question of whether the photo in question was welcomed by its recipient or unwanted. Again: consenting adults.
As long as the media and Congress seem to have infinite time and resources to investigate sex scandals in the military, here's a real sex scandal for them: the Defense Department estimates that 19,000 sexual assaults occurred in the armed forces last year, but only 3,000 service members reported being assaulted, and about 240 cases were prosecuted.
There, there's your real scandal. Go spend some ink on that.
In the meantime, we're still a nation at war, and it would be nice if everybody spent more time focusing on that instead of indulging in all this prurient hand-wringing over these pecadillos.
Wednesday, November 7, 2012
Four quick thoughts on yesterday's election
I have all sorts of thoughts about yesterday's election, but have instead been busy as heck at work all day and am running off to a village water management board meeting, so I'm just going to type like heck for a few minutes and let fly.
1) Congratulation, Democrats. Don't get cocky. The GOP somehow managed to nominate the living embodiment of everything that's gone wrong in our economy. Then he ran on a platform of everything that's wrong with GOP economic theory these days combined with a breathtaking cynicism and contempt for the truth.
And we still only managed to beat him by a few percent. More thoughts on what we should be doing better in the future later.
But in the meantime, despite my criticism above I'm extremely proud that we re-elected Barack Obama as president. All in all I think he did a very good job in a difficult situation during his first four years. And I'm excited to see what he does with the next four.
2) Republicans, you don't want to hear this from me, but you've now been defeated in the popular vote for president in five of the last six elections. If you want this trend to continue, by all means come away from this election thinking that the problem was that Mitt Romney wasn't nearly conservative enough.
Your real problem is that apparently most of you have abandoned reality for the Fox News / Rush Limbaugh fantasy bubble. One thing I used to like about conservative opinion was that it prided itself on being a fact-based alternative to the muddle-headed fuzzy thinking of liberals who preferred wish-fulfilment policies to reality. Now the Democratic Party seems to have a monopoly on science and math and reality.
If you bought into your punditry's criticism of the polls or its criticism of Nate Silver's analysis of the polls, last night you got a good dose of how far from reality you've been living over the last four years. And guess what? It hasn't just been polling. It's been pretty much everything. You can either plunge back into denial or you can begin to deal with it like an adult.
You want to compete for votes in the 21st Century? Here's a place to start: global warming is real and man-made. What should we do about it? If you want to argue that point by denying climate change or its causes, you're not ready to govern in the 21st Century. You deserve the future drubbings you're going to take at the polls.
3) The gerrymander is alive and well. I'll do the math later, but the outcome in this race would've looked much different if we had fair and competitive legislative seats at the federal, state, and county levels. There was a lot of attention yesterday on all the ways that some people were disenfranchised at the polls. But there's not nearly attention paid to the ways in which we're all disenfranchised by the redistricting process before the voting even starts.
3A) The Electoral College must go.
4) For the most part I'm really proud of the way voters cut through a lot of tough decisions yesterday. But there was one item that made me think that 10,809 voters in my own township need to go back to Remedial Voter school. From the Spinal Column's Election Results Coverage:
Commerce Township Clerk
Even though township Clerk Dan Munro said he would resign the clerk’s job if elected in the Tuesday, Nov. 6 general election to work in the private sector, voters overwhelmingly chose him over independent candidate Janet Bushey, who Munro is backing.
Munro received 66 percent of the vote (10,809 votes) to Bushey’s 33 percent (5,376 votes).
Munro has stated publicly that if he was elected, he would resign effective in January 2013 and recommend that the township Board of Trustees appoint Bushey.
If you voted for Dan Munro for Commerce Township clerk yesterday, you might want to consider that you're letting the "R" next to a name lead you into some bad decisions in the ol' voting booth. Dan's a good guy, but he took another job, and was only on the ballot because it was too late to get off the ballot. For Pete's sake, he endorsed his opponent!
And then she lost to him by 33%!!!
I get that I live in a Republican-leaning area and that it was a long, long ballot. But, seriously, some of you need to pay a bit more attention to what you're doing.
If that ballot was a car, I'd be issuing 10,809 of you a traffic ticket and sending you back to remedial driving school.
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
Presidential Campaign Update: One Week Remaining. (Thank God!)
A week from now, the presidential campaigns will be trying to drag the last few recalcitrant voters to the polls before collapsing in exhaustion as they await the final result. (The polls close at 8 pm here in Michigan. Results begin to flow by 9 pm.) Usually campaign workers themselves are the most tired people in all the land by the end of Election Day, since most of them finish the last four days in a doughnut-and-caffeine driven sleepless frenzy. Honestly, I've known campaign workers who were so tired by the time the polls closed that they went home, fell asleep, and didn't even find out the result until the next morning.
But this time around, I'm pretty sure all of America is equally tired of this campaign. And why not? Thanks to an entrenched opposition in Congress and broadcast platforms dominated by Fox News and the various right-wing radio commentators it has lasted for all four years of Obama's presidency. As a Democrat I would've greatly appreciated it if Obama had begun campaigning himself in response, since he left the field open for the GOP electoral wave of 2010. But after two years or so of his re-election campaign, I must confess that I've now had more than my fill of fundraising pleas and viral videos from the home team, too.
Worse yet, since I decided in an act of sheer masochism to pay attention to the GOP primary and write a few blog posts about it, I've been paying far too much attention to the whole thing myself for nearly a year.
Believe me, I'm as ready as anybody for 8 pm on Nov. 6 to arrive!
So what I can I write as it all comes down to the end that you haven't already read a hundred times on a hundred other blog posts? What have I learned in the last year that's worth passing along?
Well, let's see. Since the last post I wrote was back in mid-September when Obama had gained a lead in the polls while Romney was still in mid-implosion from his intemperate remarks around Libya and the 47% tape, a quick recap of events since then might be in order.
The biggest development since then was the debates, especially Romney's decisive victory in the first debate in Denver. Going into that night Obama had opened enough of a lead that an excellent chance had developed that some of the GOP SuperPACs would pull much of their funding from the presidential race and redirect it into the Congressional races. Romney's victory didn't just close the gap in the polls. It rescued his campaign's ability to muster the resources they would need to compete down the stretch. Obama flubbed the one real opportunity either campaign has had to deliver a knockout blow.
Fortunately for the Dems after a couple of weeks of full-panic mode, Obama bounced back with better performances in the final two debates to right the ship and return the race to what it has pretty much been all along ... a really close national race with a slight edge for Obama in a few Midwestern swing states, most notably Ohio, Wisconsin, and Michigan. (As always, I recommend Nate Silver's Fivethirtyeight.com blog for a good look at the overall state of the polls.)
So, what do Ohio, Wisconsin, and Michigan have in common?
Yup, it's the auto industry. Barrels of virtual ink have already been spilled online about how this race may ultimately come down to 2009 and what Romney wrote ("Let Detroit Go Bankrupt") versus what Obama did to rescue the auto industry when it faced bankruptcy and dissolution. I'll simply add that I think there's a lot of justice if this election comes down to that one issue. It's a good distillation of their core beliefs, and in retrospect it's quite apparent that Obama made the right call.
I expected the debates to be the last newsworthy event in the campaign. Then Hurricane Sandy slammed into the East Coast last night and caused widespread damage. It's too early to tell whether there will be any impact on the final voting numbers, but it seems likely to be a good test of Obama's efforts to revamp FEMA and to improve the nation's disaster response. The chance to act Presidential during the last week of the campaign has to be good news for Obama, especially given the contrast with Romney's remarks during a primary debate in favor of eliminating or privatizing federal disaster relief. A few kind remarks from New Jersey Governor and GOP keynoter Chris Christie probably don't hurt, either.
(In saner times Christie's remarks would go under the heading of "common courtesy during a disaster". But one week before Election Day is not a sane time, so Christie's comments seem to have caused quite a stir among the punditocracy today.)
However, the truth is that there are very, very few undecided voters left at this point. The vast majority of the electorate will watch this crisis play out with partisan eyes, especially since they will generally watch the disaster response play out this week through media channels that will reinforce their preconceived notions. I have a sneaky suspicion that Fox News won't discuss climate change much this week, but MSNBC will invoke Hurricane Katrina more than a thousand times 'twixt now and Nov. 6. Righteous indignation will rise on both sides, but few minds will be changed.
In nitty-gritty electoral details, the states that suffered the most damage weren't particularly in play this year, though Virginia, Ohio, and New Hampshire did all receive a bit of damage from the storm. I'd guess that nothing that comes out of the Sandy aftermath is likely to change many minds in Ohio or to motivate a sporadic voter in Virginia to show up on Nov. 6. But I do predict that pundits will cite Sandy and its aftermath as a key turning point, no matter who wins when the votes are counted.
What else have we learned from this election? Well, I did recently finish off a really interesting book called The Victory Lab by Sasha Issenberg. It had a lot to say about how genuine campaign experimentation has taken hold in a lot of corners of the campaign biz, and how the results are changing the ways that campaigns try to reach voters to change minds and push them to the polls. But if you want to know more about it, rather than drag you through the details let me send you to this recent Slate article written by Issenberg: Obama Does It Better: When it comes to targeting and persuading voters, the Democrats have a bigger advantage over the GOP than either party has ever had in the modern campaign era. I'm not sure I entirely agree with the conclusion in the article's title, but it's an interesting read and you'll learn a ton about modern campaigning.
And that's about it. The 2012 campaign has been one of the strangest electoral sagas I can recall, especially on the GOP side where that unbelievably loopy assortment tried and failed to knock Romney out of his seemingly inevitable front-runner spot: Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, Thaddeus McCotter (Good God, that's right! Thaddeus McCotter was in this thing before resigning his office in disgrace!), Rick Santorum, Ron Paul, Gary Johnson, Buddy Roemer, Rick Perry (Ooops!), Ron Pawlenty (more dull than loopy, really), Jon Hunstman, and probably another dozen too obscure to even mention with this gang.
And let us never forget that even Jimmy McMillan, the founder of The Rent Is Too Damn High Party also declared at one point that he would enter this year's Republican field. Though he never qualified for a ballot, in retrospect we can all agree that he would've been a better selection than Donald Trump.
And yet here we are with what everybody pretty much predicted at least a couple of years ago: a close election between Obama and Romney that'll probably come down to what a hundred-thousand or so Buckeye fans decide to do on Election Day.
So with all that, what's my own prediction for the outcome one week from today?
Well, Nate Silver is my guiding star, so I reckon I'll go with a 294-244 electoral victory and a 50%-49% popular vote edge for Obama. We shall see.
But this time around, I'm pretty sure all of America is equally tired of this campaign. And why not? Thanks to an entrenched opposition in Congress and broadcast platforms dominated by Fox News and the various right-wing radio commentators it has lasted for all four years of Obama's presidency. As a Democrat I would've greatly appreciated it if Obama had begun campaigning himself in response, since he left the field open for the GOP electoral wave of 2010. But after two years or so of his re-election campaign, I must confess that I've now had more than my fill of fundraising pleas and viral videos from the home team, too.
Worse yet, since I decided in an act of sheer masochism to pay attention to the GOP primary and write a few blog posts about it, I've been paying far too much attention to the whole thing myself for nearly a year.
Believe me, I'm as ready as anybody for 8 pm on Nov. 6 to arrive!
So what I can I write as it all comes down to the end that you haven't already read a hundred times on a hundred other blog posts? What have I learned in the last year that's worth passing along?
Well, let's see. Since the last post I wrote was back in mid-September when Obama had gained a lead in the polls while Romney was still in mid-implosion from his intemperate remarks around Libya and the 47% tape, a quick recap of events since then might be in order.
The biggest development since then was the debates, especially Romney's decisive victory in the first debate in Denver. Going into that night Obama had opened enough of a lead that an excellent chance had developed that some of the GOP SuperPACs would pull much of their funding from the presidential race and redirect it into the Congressional races. Romney's victory didn't just close the gap in the polls. It rescued his campaign's ability to muster the resources they would need to compete down the stretch. Obama flubbed the one real opportunity either campaign has had to deliver a knockout blow.
Fortunately for the Dems after a couple of weeks of full-panic mode, Obama bounced back with better performances in the final two debates to right the ship and return the race to what it has pretty much been all along ... a really close national race with a slight edge for Obama in a few Midwestern swing states, most notably Ohio, Wisconsin, and Michigan. (As always, I recommend Nate Silver's Fivethirtyeight.com blog for a good look at the overall state of the polls.)
So, what do Ohio, Wisconsin, and Michigan have in common?
Yup, it's the auto industry. Barrels of virtual ink have already been spilled online about how this race may ultimately come down to 2009 and what Romney wrote ("Let Detroit Go Bankrupt") versus what Obama did to rescue the auto industry when it faced bankruptcy and dissolution. I'll simply add that I think there's a lot of justice if this election comes down to that one issue. It's a good distillation of their core beliefs, and in retrospect it's quite apparent that Obama made the right call.
I expected the debates to be the last newsworthy event in the campaign. Then Hurricane Sandy slammed into the East Coast last night and caused widespread damage. It's too early to tell whether there will be any impact on the final voting numbers, but it seems likely to be a good test of Obama's efforts to revamp FEMA and to improve the nation's disaster response. The chance to act Presidential during the last week of the campaign has to be good news for Obama, especially given the contrast with Romney's remarks during a primary debate in favor of eliminating or privatizing federal disaster relief. A few kind remarks from New Jersey Governor and GOP keynoter Chris Christie probably don't hurt, either.
(In saner times Christie's remarks would go under the heading of "common courtesy during a disaster". But one week before Election Day is not a sane time, so Christie's comments seem to have caused quite a stir among the punditocracy today.)
However, the truth is that there are very, very few undecided voters left at this point. The vast majority of the electorate will watch this crisis play out with partisan eyes, especially since they will generally watch the disaster response play out this week through media channels that will reinforce their preconceived notions. I have a sneaky suspicion that Fox News won't discuss climate change much this week, but MSNBC will invoke Hurricane Katrina more than a thousand times 'twixt now and Nov. 6. Righteous indignation will rise on both sides, but few minds will be changed.
In nitty-gritty electoral details, the states that suffered the most damage weren't particularly in play this year, though Virginia, Ohio, and New Hampshire did all receive a bit of damage from the storm. I'd guess that nothing that comes out of the Sandy aftermath is likely to change many minds in Ohio or to motivate a sporadic voter in Virginia to show up on Nov. 6. But I do predict that pundits will cite Sandy and its aftermath as a key turning point, no matter who wins when the votes are counted.
What else have we learned from this election? Well, I did recently finish off a really interesting book called The Victory Lab by Sasha Issenberg. It had a lot to say about how genuine campaign experimentation has taken hold in a lot of corners of the campaign biz, and how the results are changing the ways that campaigns try to reach voters to change minds and push them to the polls. But if you want to know more about it, rather than drag you through the details let me send you to this recent Slate article written by Issenberg: Obama Does It Better: When it comes to targeting and persuading voters, the Democrats have a bigger advantage over the GOP than either party has ever had in the modern campaign era. I'm not sure I entirely agree with the conclusion in the article's title, but it's an interesting read and you'll learn a ton about modern campaigning.
And that's about it. The 2012 campaign has been one of the strangest electoral sagas I can recall, especially on the GOP side where that unbelievably loopy assortment tried and failed to knock Romney out of his seemingly inevitable front-runner spot: Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, Thaddeus McCotter (Good God, that's right! Thaddeus McCotter was in this thing before resigning his office in disgrace!), Rick Santorum, Ron Paul, Gary Johnson, Buddy Roemer, Rick Perry (Ooops!), Ron Pawlenty (more dull than loopy, really), Jon Hunstman, and probably another dozen too obscure to even mention with this gang.
And let us never forget that even Jimmy McMillan, the founder of The Rent Is Too Damn High Party also declared at one point that he would enter this year's Republican field. Though he never qualified for a ballot, in retrospect we can all agree that he would've been a better selection than Donald Trump.
And yet here we are with what everybody pretty much predicted at least a couple of years ago: a close election between Obama and Romney that'll probably come down to what a hundred-thousand or so Buckeye fans decide to do on Election Day.
So with all that, what's my own prediction for the outcome one week from today?
Well, Nate Silver is my guiding star, so I reckon I'll go with a 294-244 electoral victory and a 50%-49% popular vote edge for Obama. We shall see.
Sunday, October 28, 2012
Random pre-storm Hurricane Sandy commentary...
... from my Facebook account today:
John Magee
We're already seeing cloud bands and wind from Hurricane Sandy in Detroit. I sincerely hope all of my friends and family on the East Coast have battened down the hatches and gotten themselves out of flood zones. I have a feeling this is going to be a bad one.
Phil Gaven
I haven't any hatches to batten. I'm hatchless.
John Magee
Phil, strap down the beehives and put little teeny weeny life jackets on all the bees!
Jeffrey Kofsky
I just wish I had a wheelbarrow full of booze!
John Magee
Jeff, It's not enough to just have a wheelbarrow full of booze when Frankenstorm hits. I had to do important pre-storm preparations ... like making sure I had a cooler full of mixers on hand and ready to go.
Jeffrey Kofsky
And most of those are sold at stores that actually require you to wear pants in order to be served, I suppose. Tough life!
John Magee
In these trying times we need to pull together as a nation and stop worrying about the arbitrary issues that politicians use to divide us, like who is and who isn't wearing pants at the store.
John Magee
We're already seeing cloud bands and wind from Hurricane Sandy in Detroit. I sincerely hope all of my friends and family on the East Coast have battened down the hatches and gotten themselves out of flood zones. I have a feeling this is going to be a bad one.
Phil Gaven
I haven't any hatches to batten. I'm hatchless.
John Magee
Phil, strap down the beehives and put little teeny weeny life jackets on all the bees!
Jeffrey Kofsky
I just wish I had a wheelbarrow full of booze!
John Magee
Jeff, It's not enough to just have a wheelbarrow full of booze when Frankenstorm hits. I had to do important pre-storm preparations ... like making sure I had a cooler full of mixers on hand and ready to go.
Jeffrey Kofsky
And most of those are sold at stores that actually require you to wear pants in order to be served, I suppose. Tough life!
John Magee
In these trying times we need to pull together as a nation and stop worrying about the arbitrary issues that politicians use to divide us, like who is and who isn't wearing pants at the store.
Monday, October 1, 2012
How Gerrymandering Is Destroying Our Democracy
Okay, so that headline sounds a bit grandiose, but if you asked me to name the most corrosive element in our democracy right now, it wouldn't be campaign finance, media outrage machines, lobbying gone wild, or any of a dozen other very real problems that we have.
I would nominate the widespread practice of gerrymandering: drawing voting districts along partisan lines either to give one party or the other an advantage in a legislature, or to give both parties safe seats that leave incumbents more accountable to challenges from the far wing of their own party than from opponents from the other party or from the middle of the electorate. A lot of voters are unaware that this activity even happens, much less how it has become a rigged system to choose your lawmaker for you.
Before I go much farther down this path, I'm going to recommend to you an article on gerrymandering in this month's Atlantic magazine: The League of Dangerous Mapmakers by Robert Draper. Go give it a read ... I'll be here when you get back.
Okay, you're back? Fascinating, isn't it?!
That's pretty much the article that I would have liked to have written on this topic, if I had more time and actual journalism skills. The only difference is that I probably would've used some local Michigan examples that appear on my own ballot: the Thaddeus McCotter saga in Michigan's 11th U.S. House District, the bizarre and brutal story of the redistricting re-legislation for the Oakland County Board of Commissioners, and a half-dozen other good examples from the Republican-controlled redistricting process in Michigan. Rest assured, they're all as good as anything in that article. A couple of them are even more colorful and egregious.
But rather than depress you with a long saga of political malfeasance and skulduggery, let me just state the problem as I see it, and talk about how we can fix it.
When I look at the U.S. Congress and our state legislature in Michigan these days, I wonder how these institutions became so broken. The biggest problem that I see is that moderate lawmakers from either party are nearly extinct. There will always be a certain number of safe districts, but the systematic push to ensure that the vast majority of our legislatures will only be chosen in a primary means that moderate and independent voters -- by far the biggest bloc of voters in America -- are almost entirely unrepresented by their lawmakers.
Is it any wonder that our state and federal legislatures look broken and gridlocked most of the time? We take the people most stridently opposed to one another, leave them unaccountable to the voters, and then ask them all to work it out nicely. Good luck with that!
The good news is that this is one thing that is broken in our system that I think we can fix. As mentioned in the Atlantic article, several states have adopted non-partisan redistricting commissions. And although partisan shenanigans were often involved in their adoption, it still strikes me as a very big step in the right direction.
After this year's election, I plan to follow up with a look at the results. My theory is that the states with nonpartisan redistricting boards will have much closer general election results than the states whose boundaries were drawn by boards dominated by a single party or boards drawn by bipartisan commissions. Meanwhile the average margin of victory in the other states will have grown even larger as everybody settles into their new and comfy safe districts. Believe it or not, my general expectation is that the next Congress will be even more intransigent than the current disaster.
Comfy, safe districts are the problem here, folks. We have an awful lot of lawmakers who are far too comfortable in their position and far too unwilling to compromise with one another to get things done. It needs to stop, and we need to be the ones to put a stop to it.
I would nominate the widespread practice of gerrymandering: drawing voting districts along partisan lines either to give one party or the other an advantage in a legislature, or to give both parties safe seats that leave incumbents more accountable to challenges from the far wing of their own party than from opponents from the other party or from the middle of the electorate. A lot of voters are unaware that this activity even happens, much less how it has become a rigged system to choose your lawmaker for you.
Before I go much farther down this path, I'm going to recommend to you an article on gerrymandering in this month's Atlantic magazine: The League of Dangerous Mapmakers by Robert Draper. Go give it a read ... I'll be here when you get back.
Okay, you're back? Fascinating, isn't it?!
That's pretty much the article that I would have liked to have written on this topic, if I had more time and actual journalism skills. The only difference is that I probably would've used some local Michigan examples that appear on my own ballot: the Thaddeus McCotter saga in Michigan's 11th U.S. House District, the bizarre and brutal story of the redistricting re-legislation for the Oakland County Board of Commissioners, and a half-dozen other good examples from the Republican-controlled redistricting process in Michigan. Rest assured, they're all as good as anything in that article. A couple of them are even more colorful and egregious.
But rather than depress you with a long saga of political malfeasance and skulduggery, let me just state the problem as I see it, and talk about how we can fix it.
When I look at the U.S. Congress and our state legislature in Michigan these days, I wonder how these institutions became so broken. The biggest problem that I see is that moderate lawmakers from either party are nearly extinct. There will always be a certain number of safe districts, but the systematic push to ensure that the vast majority of our legislatures will only be chosen in a primary means that moderate and independent voters -- by far the biggest bloc of voters in America -- are almost entirely unrepresented by their lawmakers.
Is it any wonder that our state and federal legislatures look broken and gridlocked most of the time? We take the people most stridently opposed to one another, leave them unaccountable to the voters, and then ask them all to work it out nicely. Good luck with that!
The good news is that this is one thing that is broken in our system that I think we can fix. As mentioned in the Atlantic article, several states have adopted non-partisan redistricting commissions. And although partisan shenanigans were often involved in their adoption, it still strikes me as a very big step in the right direction.
After this year's election, I plan to follow up with a look at the results. My theory is that the states with nonpartisan redistricting boards will have much closer general election results than the states whose boundaries were drawn by boards dominated by a single party or boards drawn by bipartisan commissions. Meanwhile the average margin of victory in the other states will have grown even larger as everybody settles into their new and comfy safe districts. Believe it or not, my general expectation is that the next Congress will be even more intransigent than the current disaster.
Comfy, safe districts are the problem here, folks. We have an awful lot of lawmakers who are far too comfortable in their position and far too unwilling to compromise with one another to get things done. It needs to stop, and we need to be the ones to put a stop to it.
Friday, September 28, 2012
First sunset cruise with the wheelbarrow o'booze
For reasons unknown Facebook seems unwilling to take my photographs again today, so Blogger gains a few more photos.
When last we checked in with our heroes, they had just won an entire freaking wheelbarrow full of booze:
Good grief, look at it all! This house isn't big enough for all this hooch! It'll have to go ... one drink at a time. And so, with sunset looming on a Friday evening, it seemed a good time to take a crack at drinking down some of this ridiculous pile.
Tonight's winning drink? Sour apple martini mix and Luksusowa triple-distilled potato vodka from Poland.
That's right, my pretties. You're all destined for this glass mug.
Your time will come. Your time will come.
And so we launched the final Friday night sunset cruise of September on Wolverine Lake.
Katie the Beagle took the lookout position at the bow.
The view from the captain's chair.
Katie the Beagle abandons her post at the bow to collect some petting.
Moonrise.
Yup, more petting for Katie the Beagle.
Finally, the sun had set, so we pulled into port beneath a full moon and headed back inside for a nice hot bowl of delicious leftover chicken stew. And yes, the sour-apple martinis were tasty.
All-in-all, a splendid sunset cruise on a truly lovely September evening.
The Outrage Machines
One of my Republican friends posted a link on my Facebook wall to this Fox News story (US officials knew Libya attack was terrorism within 24 hours, sources confirm) and then said:
By the time I saw the post it was late -- and frankly, I was more interested in the enormous wheelbarrow filled with hooch that I had just won -- so my reply was certainly not what he desired:
"You want me to start fact-checking Fox News, now? Isn't there a whole chunk of the Internet dedicated to that?"
But after thinking it over a bit further today, I think it might be a good idea to write a bit to explain why I reacted that way, so here goes.
There is a large section of the media that are outrage machines, devoted to creating outrage and then directing that outrage towards partisan ends. The largest and most successful segment is the conservative-oriented Fox News and Rush Limbaugh segment, with all of the associated pundits, commentators, and writers. The left wing has never been nearly as successful at this, but although Air America proved a fiscal flop on the radio, MSNBC and Current are actively flying the liberal flag on cable TV. And Doonesbury still crushes Mallard Fillmore on the comic-book pages, so at least we Democrats still have that going for us as long as Garry Trudeau keeps plugging away.
There are also an awful lot of institutions out there that make a good-faith effort to provide what passes for non-aligned journalism these days: assorted newspapers, wire services, trade journals, web sites, local TV news, radio news, PBS and NPR, and the national news networks. Many of them have partisan leanings of one sort or another, especially the web sites. If you looked at PBS and NPR on that list and immediately thought either "liberal media bias" or "false equivalency sellouts", you now at least have an honest answer as to where you stand on the news consumer political spectrum.
The real bias that I find in most of the non-outrage-based news organizations is towards circulation and ratings numbers. Or, if I may quote the popular saying in newsrooms regarding stories with violence and crime, "If it bleeds, it leads." One of the real flaws in modern journalism is the enormous 24/7 news hole that they need to fill and the business needs that all too often drive them to value ratings over informative content.
And so the outrage machines spend all day every day shouting about whatever it is they're outraged about that day because that's what they do. And the more legitimate news organizations also spend a lot of the day inflating the importance of whatever news they have because they have an overwhelming need to convince you that whatever it is they have to plug the news hole at that moment is so important that you must devote your time and attention to it. (Or, to put it as a local TV news tease, "Tonight we have new information that could save your life. We'll tell you about it after the break....")
When the Information Age started to break, I had a naive belief that now people would free themselves of the narrow tunnels through which they viewed the news and take advantage of the new opportunity to search for themselves across a sea of diverse opinions. I should have thought a bit more carefully about human nature before jumping to that conclusion. In general we seem to have instead chosen to take advantage of the explosion of news and information availability to search diligently for the pack of opinions that exactly match our own preconceived notions.
A depressing number of Americans choose to immerse themselves in the outrage machines of the right or of the left to point that they exclude opposing or neutral opinions from their news diet, and instead engage solely with the straw men summoned by their own side. To these people liberals are idiots who want to destroy America and conservatives are a pack of greedy fascists who don't care about anybody but themselves. If you find yourself uttering either opinion on a regular basis, you may be spending a wee bit too much time in your outrage machine.
I've spent a lot of my lifetime with a pretty good view behind the curtain of news organizations and their product. I grew up around a small-town newspaper (the ol' Glens Falls Post-Star, shoutout to Hometown, U.S.A.!) worked for a couple of newspapers, and later worked at least part-time for it and a couple of other small newspapers. I also spent several years as a high-volume periodical indexer mostly working with business periodicals, which was an unimaginably great opportunity to see beyond the day-to-day details of the news and really understand the structures and frameworks upon which nearly all "news" stories are based, be they ginned-up outrage messaging, genuine journalism, or the eyeball-trolling that makes up the bulk of the news cycle.
For those unlikely to spend a few years in an intellectual sweatshop perusing the back pages of Bond Buyer and American Metal Market, you can see much the same effect if you compare sports radio and commentary with political radio and commentary -- same structures: different themes, topics, and details.
And so whenever I see any news story, I reflexively evaluate it for a lot of things beyond the details in the story:
On my own scale of news evaluation, Fox News scores pretty highly for having a clearly understood bias -- which is a plus with me, since at least I know where they're coming from -- but very low on the credibility scale due to their well-known and long established habit of embroidering fact with a complicated web of half-truths, omissions, and the occasional flat-out whopper.
Before shooting me as the hopelessly liberal biased messenger of that evaluation, let me give you two fairly recent news stories from reasonably credible sources:
Or, if you would prefer a more entertaining take on Fox News's credibility, I refer you to the cumulative broadcasts of The Daily Show for the last umpteen years.
And so when that Fox News story got posted on my timeline with the comment at the top of this post, I didn't think, "My gosh, this is terrible. This set of facts makes me entirely re-evaluate everything I've learned over the last three years and nine months of the Obama administration."
I really had three simultaneous thoughts:
1) How is this story any different than the hourly scream of outrage at Obama's presidency that appears nonstop on Fox News?
2) I have no interest in digging into this particular story to try to disentangle what is true, what is half-true, what is omitted, and what is outright lie. It's an enormously time-consuming enterprise, just to get to the starting point. There are tons of people interested in and dedicated to this sort of fact-checking of the opposition outrage machines. I ain't one.
3) You spend your days immersed in an outrage machine, and now you want me to explain why you're outraged? It seems self-evident.
But in any event, the posting did make me do a bit of thinking, which is always good. So here's my post on that story.
-----
P.S. All of which isn't to say that I don't think there are some pretty good questions that need answering about the Mideast embassy riots and the Libyan incident in general. To start with, why the heck was there apparently no freaking security at that consulate? Who exactly was responsible for that? How close are we to finding the perpetrators? Do we get to drone-strike their asses? Have we done so already? (And better yet, can we start being a bit more selective about when and how we're using drone strikes? Killing off a specific terrorist is great, but it's also limited in efficacy when you generate enough ill-will to create five more.)
But international crises are notoriously complex, and understanding them well enough to evaluate what went on and who knew what when takes a lot of research and usually requires access to classified security briefings. I don't have any of that stuff at hand and I am certainly unlikely to collect all the data anytime soon.
P.P.S. Speaking of news sources, if the situation is as grim as my description above, what would I recommend? In general, my advice would be the same as I'd give to anybody about their eating habits: moderation and variety. As a longtime news junkie, I find that my own news intake often lacks moderation, so I try to make up for that sin with variety.
My primary news sources are the four newspapers that I get regularly: The New York Times, The Detroit Free Press, The Oakland News, and the Spinal Column, our local weekly newspaper. I don't read them cover-to-cover every day. Most mornings I just hit the sports section and the comics ... it's about all I can stand of the news in the morning. But I do try to give them a good regular browse in the evening when I get a chance. And I usualy dig in a bit deeper on Saturday and Sunday mornings. I also get a pretty good variety of newsletters and magazines that I browse and read as time permits.
On the broadcast side, I usually catch the headline news on NPR in the morning, the Daily Show and the Colbert Report at night, and I DVR most of the Sunday-morning punditry shows, both local and national. I watch very little local television news, and practically no cable television news at all, though I will tune in on occasion when something newsworthy happens, mostly to see commentary from the various perspectives. In the mornings and when I drive I listen to podcasts instead of the radio, usually on non-news topics like fantasy sports, science, and comic books.
And on the web I tend to browse around a bit from story to story and my sources vary from time to time. Sometimes I'll check Google News, just to see what their front page looks like. On the local front I find that MLive.com often makes a good news supplement to my newspapers. I've been giving Twitter a good (Monique would say, "obsessive") workout as we come down the stretch in this election cycle, and have found some pluses and minuses. Twitter tends to get more than a little echo-chamberish, so I'm trying to make sure I have a good assortment of perspectives in there, but I'm not at all convinced I've found the right balance yet. I'm sure I'll write up a post about the experience of following this election via Twitter after it's all wrapped up.
Finally, in the place of moderation, I do occasionally concede to sheer news exhaustion and institute a full news ban until I'm ready to engage with it all again. I think the longest in the last decade or so lasted three or four months. I find that I need a reasonably coherent perspective to be able to absorb as much news as I usually do, and stepping away from it altogether is a great way to find my center again. When you spend a lot of time within the news cycle, it becomes increasingly difficult to differentiate between news and noise.
So, if you've found yourself in a state of perpetual outrage at the news, let me heartily recommend a few months away from the outrage machines. You'd be surprised at what they look like when you check back in.
"John, Please explain this away with
one of your impartial blogs. Lie after lie after lie for a week until someone
was hauled in front of congress. Ambassador Rice should have resigned rather
than lie on five different Sunday talk shows for the President. Truly
sickening."
By the time I saw the post it was late -- and frankly, I was more interested in the enormous wheelbarrow filled with hooch that I had just won -- so my reply was certainly not what he desired:
"You want me to start fact-checking Fox News, now? Isn't there a whole chunk of the Internet dedicated to that?"
But after thinking it over a bit further today, I think it might be a good idea to write a bit to explain why I reacted that way, so here goes.
There is a large section of the media that are outrage machines, devoted to creating outrage and then directing that outrage towards partisan ends. The largest and most successful segment is the conservative-oriented Fox News and Rush Limbaugh segment, with all of the associated pundits, commentators, and writers. The left wing has never been nearly as successful at this, but although Air America proved a fiscal flop on the radio, MSNBC and Current are actively flying the liberal flag on cable TV. And Doonesbury still crushes Mallard Fillmore on the comic-book pages, so at least we Democrats still have that going for us as long as Garry Trudeau keeps plugging away.
There are also an awful lot of institutions out there that make a good-faith effort to provide what passes for non-aligned journalism these days: assorted newspapers, wire services, trade journals, web sites, local TV news, radio news, PBS and NPR, and the national news networks. Many of them have partisan leanings of one sort or another, especially the web sites. If you looked at PBS and NPR on that list and immediately thought either "liberal media bias" or "false equivalency sellouts", you now at least have an honest answer as to where you stand on the news consumer political spectrum.
The real bias that I find in most of the non-outrage-based news organizations is towards circulation and ratings numbers. Or, if I may quote the popular saying in newsrooms regarding stories with violence and crime, "If it bleeds, it leads." One of the real flaws in modern journalism is the enormous 24/7 news hole that they need to fill and the business needs that all too often drive them to value ratings over informative content.
And so the outrage machines spend all day every day shouting about whatever it is they're outraged about that day because that's what they do. And the more legitimate news organizations also spend a lot of the day inflating the importance of whatever news they have because they have an overwhelming need to convince you that whatever it is they have to plug the news hole at that moment is so important that you must devote your time and attention to it. (Or, to put it as a local TV news tease, "Tonight we have new information that could save your life. We'll tell you about it after the break....")
When the Information Age started to break, I had a naive belief that now people would free themselves of the narrow tunnels through which they viewed the news and take advantage of the new opportunity to search for themselves across a sea of diverse opinions. I should have thought a bit more carefully about human nature before jumping to that conclusion. In general we seem to have instead chosen to take advantage of the explosion of news and information availability to search diligently for the pack of opinions that exactly match our own preconceived notions.
A depressing number of Americans choose to immerse themselves in the outrage machines of the right or of the left to point that they exclude opposing or neutral opinions from their news diet, and instead engage solely with the straw men summoned by their own side. To these people liberals are idiots who want to destroy America and conservatives are a pack of greedy fascists who don't care about anybody but themselves. If you find yourself uttering either opinion on a regular basis, you may be spending a wee bit too much time in your outrage machine.
I've spent a lot of my lifetime with a pretty good view behind the curtain of news organizations and their product. I grew up around a small-town newspaper (the ol' Glens Falls Post-Star, shoutout to Hometown, U.S.A.!) worked for a couple of newspapers, and later worked at least part-time for it and a couple of other small newspapers. I also spent several years as a high-volume periodical indexer mostly working with business periodicals, which was an unimaginably great opportunity to see beyond the day-to-day details of the news and really understand the structures and frameworks upon which nearly all "news" stories are based, be they ginned-up outrage messaging, genuine journalism, or the eyeball-trolling that makes up the bulk of the news cycle.
For those unlikely to spend a few years in an intellectual sweatshop perusing the back pages of Bond Buyer and American Metal Market, you can see much the same effect if you compare sports radio and commentary with political radio and commentary -- same structures: different themes, topics, and details.
And so whenever I see any news story, I reflexively evaluate it for a lot of things beyond the details in the story:
- What's the source?
- What's the bias?
- What's the credibility?
- Who is quoted and cited?
- Is there confirmation from other media sources?
- Can I trust this individual item, or should I confirm it myself from a different news source?
- Is it noise or is it news?
On my own scale of news evaluation, Fox News scores pretty highly for having a clearly understood bias -- which is a plus with me, since at least I know where they're coming from -- but very low on the credibility scale due to their well-known and long established habit of embroidering fact with a complicated web of half-truths, omissions, and the occasional flat-out whopper.
Before shooting me as the hopelessly liberal biased messenger of that evaluation, let me give you two fairly recent news stories from reasonably credible sources:
- Business Insider, May 22, 2012: STUDY: Watching Only Fox News Makes You Less Informed Than Watching No News At All.
- Live Science, Sept. 25, 2012: Fox News Climate Coverage 93% Wrong, Report Finds.
Or, if you would prefer a more entertaining take on Fox News's credibility, I refer you to the cumulative broadcasts of The Daily Show for the last umpteen years.
And so when that Fox News story got posted on my timeline with the comment at the top of this post, I didn't think, "My gosh, this is terrible. This set of facts makes me entirely re-evaluate everything I've learned over the last three years and nine months of the Obama administration."
I really had three simultaneous thoughts:
1) How is this story any different than the hourly scream of outrage at Obama's presidency that appears nonstop on Fox News?
2) I have no interest in digging into this particular story to try to disentangle what is true, what is half-true, what is omitted, and what is outright lie. It's an enormously time-consuming enterprise, just to get to the starting point. There are tons of people interested in and dedicated to this sort of fact-checking of the opposition outrage machines. I ain't one.
3) You spend your days immersed in an outrage machine, and now you want me to explain why you're outraged? It seems self-evident.
But in any event, the posting did make me do a bit of thinking, which is always good. So here's my post on that story.
-----
P.S. All of which isn't to say that I don't think there are some pretty good questions that need answering about the Mideast embassy riots and the Libyan incident in general. To start with, why the heck was there apparently no freaking security at that consulate? Who exactly was responsible for that? How close are we to finding the perpetrators? Do we get to drone-strike their asses? Have we done so already? (And better yet, can we start being a bit more selective about when and how we're using drone strikes? Killing off a specific terrorist is great, but it's also limited in efficacy when you generate enough ill-will to create five more.)
But international crises are notoriously complex, and understanding them well enough to evaluate what went on and who knew what when takes a lot of research and usually requires access to classified security briefings. I don't have any of that stuff at hand and I am certainly unlikely to collect all the data anytime soon.
P.P.S. Speaking of news sources, if the situation is as grim as my description above, what would I recommend? In general, my advice would be the same as I'd give to anybody about their eating habits: moderation and variety. As a longtime news junkie, I find that my own news intake often lacks moderation, so I try to make up for that sin with variety.
My primary news sources are the four newspapers that I get regularly: The New York Times, The Detroit Free Press, The Oakland News, and the Spinal Column, our local weekly newspaper. I don't read them cover-to-cover every day. Most mornings I just hit the sports section and the comics ... it's about all I can stand of the news in the morning. But I do try to give them a good regular browse in the evening when I get a chance. And I usualy dig in a bit deeper on Saturday and Sunday mornings. I also get a pretty good variety of newsletters and magazines that I browse and read as time permits.
On the broadcast side, I usually catch the headline news on NPR in the morning, the Daily Show and the Colbert Report at night, and I DVR most of the Sunday-morning punditry shows, both local and national. I watch very little local television news, and practically no cable television news at all, though I will tune in on occasion when something newsworthy happens, mostly to see commentary from the various perspectives. In the mornings and when I drive I listen to podcasts instead of the radio, usually on non-news topics like fantasy sports, science, and comic books.
And on the web I tend to browse around a bit from story to story and my sources vary from time to time. Sometimes I'll check Google News, just to see what their front page looks like. On the local front I find that MLive.com often makes a good news supplement to my newspapers. I've been giving Twitter a good (Monique would say, "obsessive") workout as we come down the stretch in this election cycle, and have found some pluses and minuses. Twitter tends to get more than a little echo-chamberish, so I'm trying to make sure I have a good assortment of perspectives in there, but I'm not at all convinced I've found the right balance yet. I'm sure I'll write up a post about the experience of following this election via Twitter after it's all wrapped up.
Finally, in the place of moderation, I do occasionally concede to sheer news exhaustion and institute a full news ban until I'm ready to engage with it all again. I think the longest in the last decade or so lasted three or four months. I find that I need a reasonably coherent perspective to be able to absorb as much news as I usually do, and stepping away from it altogether is a great way to find my center again. When you spend a lot of time within the news cycle, it becomes increasingly difficult to differentiate between news and noise.
So, if you've found yourself in a state of perpetual outrage at the news, let me heartily recommend a few months away from the outrage machines. You'd be surprised at what they look like when you check back in.
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