Category Archives: Politics: US

Alan Grayson is a master at making a point. See for example today's effort, What Republicans Can Do With Their Tax Cuts For The Rich:

The man is not subtle, but he is effective. Given that the voters of his Florida district have replaced him with a dangerously crazy person, Grayson needs a new gig. [Update: as commentator “Mike” points out, I've mixed up my Republicans. Grayson was defeated by the somewhat less crazy Daniel Webster — he's one of the no-abortion-even-cases-of-rape-or-incest 'family values' candidates.]

Someone get him a TV show! (Or maybe talk radio?)

Seth Godin, Voting, misunderstood:

This year, fewer than 40% of voting age Americans will actually vote.

A serious glitch in self-marketing, I think.

If you don't vote because you're trying to teach politicians a lesson, you're tragically misguided in your strategy. The very politicians you're trying to send a message to don't want you to vote. Since 1960, voting turnouts in mid-term elections are down significantly, and there's one reason: because of TV advertising.

Political TV advertising is designed to do only one thing: suppress the turnout of the opponent's supporters. If the TV ads can turn you off enough not to vote (“they're all bums”) then their strategy has succeeded.

The astonishing thing is that voters haven't figured this out. As the scumminess and nastiness of campaigning and governing has escalated and the flakiness of candidates appears to have escalated as well, we've largely abdicated the high ground and permitted selfish partisans on both sides to hijack the system.

Voting is free. It's fairly fast. It doesn't make you responsible for the outcome, but it sure has an impact on what we have to live with going forward. The only thing that would make it better is free snacks.

Even if you're disgusted, vote. Vote for your least unfavorite choice. But go vote.

I'm not sure that negative advertising is intended simply to suppress the other side's vote. I think the people who do it believe that they can make their candidate the lesser of two evils by defining the other gal/guy as evil incarnate, and that this does translate into votes.

But it's interesting to see an outsider's perspective.

In the wake of the Juan Williams firing (see Half Way to Pledge Week), a number of leading Republicans have called for the de-fuding of not just NPR but all public broadcasting. (Direct public funding of NPR is about 2% of its budget, but by the time you add up the indirect revenue it grows to about 20%. NPR is only a small part of federal spending on public broadcasting.)

This is overreach and likely will end badly for them, as it casts Republican grinches against Big Bird and Bert and Ernie.

Richard Nixon tried to cut funding for PBS in half once, and Mr. Rogers went to capitol hill and got the money back. See Mister Rogers defending PBS to the US Senate:

Big Bird is popular with most Republicans…and he didn't fire Juan Williams.

PS. Somewhat irrelevantly, people are reviving old stories about Williams from 1991 (sorry, I'm not linking to it), in which it seems he engaged in an extended and shocking practice of aggressive sexual talk to female Washington Post staff and editors, seeming from the published reports to easily rise to a level amounting to harassment. This confirms my hunch that Juan Williams is not the sort of guy you want in your organization — unless you are Fox news, where I guess he'll fit right in and enjoy his new $2 million salary — but doesn't seem to me to be an issue in the latest firing. This behavior almost 20 years ago may say something about the person (or he may have changed), but he's not a candidate for office. It may go to the wisdom of hiring him or allowing him to be a commentator in first place but I don't see the relevance to his retention once he's been hired.

Crooks and Liars predicts the trolls will be out in force on this one:

Cue the right-wing wailing and gnashing of teeth: The NAACP has now fully backed up its accusations of racism within the Tea Party movement with a meticulously documented report on the Tea parties' multifarious connections to racists and various far-right extremists.

The report, “Tea Party Nationalism,” looks at the relationships and differences between the six major Tea Party organizations — FreedomWorks Tea Party, 1776 Tea Party, Tea Party Nation, Tea Party Patriots, ResistNet, and Tea Party Express — and the various ways that each group has established connections with, and empowers, outright racists and white supremacists, as well we far-right “Patriot” extremists of various stripes.

“In these ranks, an abiding obsession with Barack Obama's birth certificate is often a stand-in for the belief that the first black president of the United States is not a 'real American.' Rather than strict adherence to the Constitution, many Tea Partiers are challenging the provision for birthright citizenship found in the Fourteenth Amendment,” write authors Devin Burghart and Leonard Zeskind of the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights, which produced the report for the NAACP.

The heart of the report is the section titled “Racism, Anti-Semitism and the Militia Impulse, which includes some previously overlooked facets of the movement and revealing details:

(There's lots more where that came from.)