blog

Health-care quote-of-the-day

"We're required to insure our cars ... but that's because we know cars are important."

- Jon Stewart

Note to Obama: Barney Frank should be named the official ambassador to the Town-Hall Crazies

Heck, we could even make it a reality show.

... I'd watch it!

Barney Frank Confronts Woman At Townhall Comparing Obama To Hitler

My write-in to ColorOfChange.org's latest petition

Dear advertiser,

I'm am writing to politely but sternly urge you to please stop advertising on Glenn Beck's repugnant, irresponsible, hysteria-inducing television program.

Anyone who pays to put Glenn Beck on TV needs to seriously re-examine their decision and wake up to what kind of a media force he represents.  This guy is the "Father Coughlin" of our times (though with even less of a moral compass) and as such will one day be shown to be squarely on the wrong side of history.  As will those like yourself, who are currently enabling him to pollute the minds of the easily-led among us -- unless you stop now.

I and my family will personally boycott any organization that enables him to stay on the air.  It's the reason we stopped watching CNN ... and of course on Fox "news" he's now right at home among his fellow demagogues.

But please, come to your senses.  Have a conscience.  Do the Right Thing and advertise somewhere else -- and by doing so, play a role in making Glenn Beck go away.  Our country and our world will be better for it.

I'm serious.

Best regards,

R

Long time no post

Yes, I've missed you, too...

Watching too much politics lately?  Sick and tired of listening to our Republican lawmakers (and Glenn Beck / Rush Limbaugh fans) keep making that claim that less regulation of the economy and weaker government are the answer to our current problems?

Then here's a funny video for you! 

REGULATION VACATION CELEBRATION!

The words aren't coming ...

... but if a picture is worth a thousand of them, here are several thousand words for why I'm so happy:

Reactions Around the World

Candor Candy FYI: Do not trust your voting machine

As far as I can tell, this video is for real.  It's an interview with a poll-worker who is trying to show that voting machine errors are just a matter of the screens not being "calibrated", i.e. the touch-screen is just off by a bit ...

... BUT, while he's trying to prove that there's nothing to worry about, he manages to disprove his own theory several times!

• First, a vote for Obama goes acidentally to some third-party candidate, then ...
• ... pressing the button for "straight democratic ticket" selects John McCain for president ...
• then finally pressing the "straight republican ticket" selects Ralph Nader!

So there's something in this video to make just about anybody mad.  Again, can somebody tell me WHY we are trusting the  beating heart of our democracy to the poorly-made, possibly illegally compromised machines???!!

 

WVA Vote Flipping Caught on Tape

So ALWAYS check your vote, both on the screen and on the paper printout.

And do not accept the result if it isn't exactly who you intended to vote for.

What cheers everybody up? POLITICALLY INCORRECT PUPPETS!

Yea!

This is from a musical my wife and I are very fond of called "Avenue Q", a sort of PG-13 Sesame Street for grownups.  In honor of the recent economic scariness and the fact that I just lost about 40% of our 401k over a few weeks, here's "It Sucks to Be Me":

Avenue Q

... And here to lighten the mood after all the obnoxious, very real bigotry coming out of the McCain-Palin rallies is a different song from the same show, one called "Everyone's a Little Bit Racist".  I couldn't find a high-quality one online, but I did manage to locate this homemade one from a "West End Live" show in New York -- with the cast changed a little.  It's harder to understand in this video -- but the lyrics are here.

Avenue Q - Everyone's A Little Bit Racist West End Live

If you haven't seen or heard the show, it's fantastic.  The CD is here.

ACORN and the Republican Noise Machine's "War on Language"

Magritte - The Bird

Or at least that's what I'm calling it.  I think the McCain campaign might go with the more banal, innocent-sounding "spin".  Even more likely, they've probably already branded this one their "War on Voter Fraud".

But that's the thing -- it's not either of those.  If anything, it's the most recent instance of a very real attack on the meaning of language.  And I'm attributing it to the Republican party because it highlights a highly-refined message-control technique that they have pioneered and used very effectively since the days of Nixon -- and perfected in the days of Bush by his chief political advisor, Karl Rove.

The "message control" I'm speaking of is a deadly effective, highly deceptive art of wordsmithing -- aimed at manipulating the media to get it to say what they want.  It's a lot like what we used to call "propaganda", but this new beast is something entirely more sophisticated, toxic, and difficult to nail down.  And it frequently plays even the most seasoned news professionals for chumps.

The irony, of course, is that while their people may not be so good at actually governing lately, they've gotten very good at this little game.  The Democrats, for whatever reason, are not so good at it -- I like to think it's because they find it dishonest and distasteful.  But then maybe it's just that their team doesn't have the gifted liars the Republicans have right now.  It's difficult to say ...

At its root, the technique consists of wording your talking points, your speeches, your slogans, and press releases in such subtly deceptive ways that you end up making behavior that's actually perfectly normal and human ... appear to be aberrant, even sinister.

Ohh, semantics!  Is there any innocent person you can't bludgeon with misbegotten rage?

Yes, well ... we shall see ...

The scene of the fracas in question -- one which I think the McCain camp won, unfortunately -- appears to have been the use of the phrase ... "to turn in".

[cue melodramatic music: "dump- dump- DUMMMMM!"]

Now "turn in", as it turns out, has more than one meaning, one of which might be

turn in - vt. 1. to submit for review, as in a homework assignment or a job application.

Pretty clear, right?  Ah-hah! But we shall show to you that it is not!

Upon closer inspection, this usage could be used to imply that the "turner-inner", if you will, is imparting a glow of legitimacy to the thing "turned-in".  There is, as it turns out, an expectation that when one "turns something in" -- that they are staking their reputation on the validity and truth of said "thing".

It was this unconscious meaning behind the phrase that Republicans exploited particularly well this week, as we will show later on, so stay with me here ...

Another usage, with quite the opposite meaning, fascinatingly -- might be

turn in - vt. 2. to relinquish, to offer up, as illegitimate or illegal, to some authority, presumably to be brought to justice.

This is the one used on TV when someone turns themselves in to the cops, or turns a drug dealer in to the DEA.

It's also the one you might use if you were "turning in" obviously-faked voter registration forms to the authorities!  Buuuut then I get ahead of myself ...

Now, if you've watched the news lately, you probably heard a lot of noise about a supposed scandal concerning ACORN, the community organization that, among other charitable causes, facilitates the voter-registration process, especially in swing states where registrations are at an all-time high, and government offices are overloaded.

The specific bit of hubbub that I heard about -- via CNN and later Fox News -- was that ACORN had reportedly "turned in" (watch out -- there's that phrase!) a few thousand voter registration forms that were found to be fraudulent.

The reporters themselves were in quite a tizzy about this, especially the ones on Fox, so much so that they didn't offer any clarification about which meaning of "turned in" was in play.

But while they were weak on research and facts, they tried to make up for it by strongly implying that

1. The proprietors of ACORN might be complicit in fraud.
   
2. ACORN also might be trying to rig the election in favor of Barack Obama (this was helped along by the fact that all the ACORN officials they showed on TV were black).
   
3. Barack Obama might be somehow in somehow cahoots with them because he once represented their organization in some court case several years ago (yes, the "dubious associations" game again: hard to prove, impossible to disprove).

Now, once again, I would like to point out that those in the news media have great power to make a story appear newsworthy simply by reporting on it -- even in cases where they are more or less passively reporting on it -- i.e. without offering up any facts, research, solid details, etc.

So here are some facts for you about 1) what really happened and 2) what the laws are.  I uncovered them simply by going to some non-mainstream media sites (our friend Rush Limbaugh would probably call them "hateful liberal blogs"):

• ACORN's only legal function in the voting arena is to help distribute empty forms and collect filled-out ones.  They can't validate them, verify them, or otherwise approve or reject them.  They are required by law to turn in every form they get.  Truth.
• What they CAN do is round up the bogus-looking ones (the ones registered to "Hannah Man-tana" and "Heywood D'Jabuzzoff") mark them, and "turn them in" to election authorities.  That is what they did.  They located fraudulent forms, marked them as suspicious, and turned them in to election officials -- as they are required to do by law.
• Since ACORN and all the other organizations like it are bound by law to turn in any and all voter registration forms to state election authorities for review, anyone helping out with the election process is going to come across some falsified forms, possibly even a large number, for whatever reason -- and no one knows who filled them out, or why, or even who they would have fraud-voted for.

Now, while we can all agree that that doesn't mean it's "right" to fill out a fraudulent registration form, we should also admit that the fact that people handed them in to ACORN doesn't mean anything about anything.  Except that some random people cause mischief and other people like to capitalize on it for political reasons.

But getting back to my first point -- the most interesting thing is the use of that phrase: "turned in".  It's the (purposefully misleading) phrase the McCain campaign used when they quote-unquote "alerted" the media to this quote-unquote "scandal", and, sadly but predictably, it's the exact wording the reporters ended up using to spread the story.

That's the beauty of their War on Language.  You can take an innocent phrase like "turned in", carefully chosen for its multiple meanings, affix it to a press release from your campaign -- and it flies totally under the radar, all the way through the news media, right back to the unsuspecting voters sitting in their homes. 

It's like magic!

All a reporter has to do to innocently spread the perception -- anywhere, everywhere -- that this trusted, charitable organization is somehow trying to subvert our democracy is to say

"ACORN was reported to have turned in illegitimate registrations in several states".

There's no research, no journalism behind that statement.  It's completely unhelpful to the public because it doesn't say what happened.  And that truly is the path of least resistance for them.  All they have to do is report the story as it was framed by the McCain campaign.

Our guilty little ill-informed minds will do the rest.  They can count on that.  We'll see the interviews with the mostly-black volunteers at ACORN and our lizard-brains of prejudice and paranoia (we all have them a little bit) will fill in the blanks.

After all, semantically at least, these reporters have told "the truth".  ACORN did "turn them in".  They just didn't feel the need to report which meaning of "turned in" actually occurred -- because??? ... well, I'm going to just give them the benefit of the doubt and assume it was laziness. But it wasn't laziness on the McCain campaign's part -- they knew exactly what they were doing.

But either way, what the media have done here (once again) is wrong and neglectful because substantially, they've helped perpetuate a great, big lie: They've tarnished the name of a good organization that does much-needed work for the community -- and ACORN does a lot more than register voters.

Most importantly, though -- as journalists, aren't they supposed to be in the business of seeing through these kinds of tricks?

Yeah.  So there you have it.  The ACORN "scandal" is another big, fat ... non- ... story.

But it sure illustrates beautifully how easy it is to make something out of nothing, then slap that big, sticky ball of nothing onto a decent person's back and force people like ... well, like myself, I suppose --  to come out and clean off the nonsense ...

With a crusty old toothbrush.

And a big bottle of Goo-Gone.

And now ... my hands smell like chemicals ...

Who on earth chooses to live like this?

Oh yeah, me!

Ye shall know them ... Part II

As an afterthought to the previous post, here's an exercise I came up with.  It's a look at ... shall we say ... the general attitude of maturity and cooperation that was (or wasn't) evident in the crowds at the two political conventions last month.

I know this is abstract, even subjective, and may appear to go against my previous comments about appealing to emotions -- but I think it's a very illuminating exercise that and reveals the spiritual stakes of this election beyond words:

 

Ignore the content of the speeches for now, and focus in on the audience close-ups.  To do this, press play on each of the videos, then press pause, and wait until the "buffer" bars at the bottom fill up (this might take several minutes, depending on the speed of your connection -- so you might want to go do something else and come back when it's done).

 

Then press play again, and skip around to a few spots in each video where the emotion is really running high -- and focus on the faces in the crowd.

Just notice the difference in the two videos.  Which crowd is more angry, and which is more inspired?  Which looks like people who want to blame others for their problems, or which wants to set aside differences and get the Good Work done?

It sounds silly, but I dare you to do this.

Which faces would you rather have representing our country -- to ourselves, to God, to the rest of the world?

 

Vice Presidential Candidate Gov. Sarah Palin (AK) Full Speech at the RNC

Sen. Barack Obama's Full Speech to the DNC

Ye shall know them by the fruits ... of their followers

Here's an ABC news article about the waves of bigoted outbursts from McCain-Palin devotees I mentioned in my last post. (The Washington Post covers the same phenomenon here, and the Politico covers it here.)

Now, I'm a big believer that a candidate's leadership starts with the tone they set in their campaign.  So the question arises -- how much of this can be blamed on "a few random loons", and how much of this is a bigger trend that has been inspired by, and should be called out by, the candidates themselves?

Well, I think it's a fair question.

And for me, it's answered when we notice that all week long the outbursts went completely unchecked by McCain, Palin, or any campaign officials -- until the media started pointing out the bigotry.  Then suddenly McCain started discouraging it, which of course made him look like a grownup for the first time.

And we know McCain and Plain were hearing them -- in some cases they were even (albeit nervously in McCain's case) agreeing with them.

My point is this: When your speeches and your surrogates' speeches are clearly aimed at exciting hatred and division -- based on the sound of a candidate's name (especially his MIDDLE name) and vague, unprovable assertions of "he's not like you" -- what else should you call it but inciting bigotry?

And of course these low-road appeals to bigotry and ignorance only work with a certain crowd, right? -- notoriously referred to by the Republicans as their "base".

I've been reading a book about Nixon, and I think he or somebody who worked for him first started using this technique: It's called "dog-whistle" politics, and it involves using loaded phraseology that will appeal to the worst instincts of your base (xenophobia, racism, anti-semitism ... whatever) -- but on the other hand has just enough semantic wiggle-room that you can play innocent and deny any accusations, saying "that's not what I meant!"

Watching the second debate last week, it was extremely illuminating how, despite going exclusively personal and negative in his on-air ads and in his rallies, McCain didn't bring up a single one of his character-assassination issues in the debate.  Why?  Because it was to a mixed crowd, and he knew he couldn't back up his bogus claims in front of a less gullible audience.

So the McCain-Palin recipe is: throw mud (and/or feces) at Obama when your easily-angered base is looking, appeal to their basest prejudices, then act "above all that" when your audience is made up of more sophisticated people.

But from an historical perspective, there's a reason leaders in the past have tended to shy away from the kind of overtly vicious campaigning like McCain-Palin have recently indulged in -- first of all, in the eyes of intelligent people, it lowers their campaign to an adolescent, sixth-grade reading level at the least, and at the worst, it creates the appearance of endorsing bigotry and in some cases violence (supporters have clearly yelled "Kill him!" at Palin rallies and Ms. Palin plowed ahead with no objections).

But from a governing standpoint, IF you do happen to win -- now you've debased yourself and lost the trust of a large portion of your electorate (as Bush did in 2000 and 2004).  The result being that it makes for a county that's very hard to govern.  And who among us doesn't understand that we're entering a period when we need to pull together?

This example isn't the most egregious one, but I found an article about a GOP party chairman from Bethlehem, PA who recently indulged in the kind of vaguely bigoted tear on Obama that has become so common as to be ignored by the media -- which doesn't make it any less childish, or any less un-American in my book:

"The number one most liberal senator in the United States of America was, you guessed it, the ambassador of change, Barack Hussein Obama," he added. "This election is about preserving America's past and protecting the promise of its future."

Oh boy.  That "most liberal senator in the senate" canard again.  Funny how four years ago they were saying it was John Kerry.  Which is it, guys?

The sage Platt had more information to disclose. "Barack Obama refused to wear an American flag on his lapel," he said of the man who, at the presidential debate the night before, was wearing a flag pin on his lapel. The audience booed. "Barack Obama, a man who wants to be president of the United States of America, removed the American flag from his chest because it was a symbol of patriotism. Perhaps Barack Obama doesn't put country first, but he puts fashion first."

And now some people in the media are praising McCain for disagreeing with the woman who said Obama was "an Arab".    Really?  As if he had a choice?  Has the bar been set that low?

Listen to the reaction of the crowd when he dares to change course for a second with one man and say they "shouldn't be afraid of" Obama and that he is "a decent man".  Some people applaud, but a big contingent feels bold enough about their hatred to actually "boo".

Mccain leaves behind attacks, old lady calls Obama "arab"

So, like I said, I'm a big believer in judging a politician by the quality of their followers -- not of a few crazies, but of this huge trend brought on by their "he doesn't love this country like you do" horseshit.  An honorable man (and/or woman) would abstain from this kind of sleazy rabble-rousing, and if they disagreed with it, would condemn it immediately when they see it happening.  It's been going on all week in front of their faces, and they only started reigning it in when the media started pointing it out -- and then of course damage has already been done.  

This is very cynical campaigning, and, to me, a disgusting way for a senator and war hero to behave.

Come on everybody, lets show these people and the rest of the world that we're not the bunch of superficially patriotic,   easily manipulated, mildly ignorant pseudo-bigots they're playing us for.