Gatekeepers No More: The Impending,Technological End to the Power of the Rich. Everything that is wrong about American politics is changing due to technology. The tyrants of the U.S. economic order are facing the same kind of challenges that the dictators of the Arab world confronted in the Arab Spring. Oh, dictators with guns can still hold on for months, but not, perhaps, for years, once public opinion outside their control demands outside intervention. Here, however, in even today's badly flawed democracy, the floodgates of change have been opened by new technologies that permit the nearly penniless to reach huge numbers of people and make an end run around the obstacles to the power of persuasion heretofore placed in their way by the rich. We don't need mass media to reach the masses. We have the Internet and social networks like Twitter and Facebook that reach millions pretty much for free.
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When I was a college student active in the gay-rights movement, the mass media were beyond our reach, by virtue of expense. We needed to operate on the cheap, and that wasn't really as cheap as we needed. The propaganda machine of the age was the mimeograf, but it wasn't free. You needed to buy a mimeo, for a couple of hundred dollars, and then paper, stencils, and ink. Someone had to cut the stencils, by hand or typewriter, then run the machine. Early models were hand-cranked; later models, electric. To run even 500 copies of a one-page flyer, you'd need one ream of paper and a couple of hours of preparation. If your message took more than one sheet, you'd have to collate and staple. Then you'd have to distribute them by hand. That meant that one person or a group of people would have to go physically out to post the flyers on bulletin boards, lite stanchions, trees, etc., or hand them out on the street. It could take hours to distribute 500 copies, and many copies would be discarded by people who took them out of curiosity but weren't interested in the message.
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To reach people beyond your immediate vicinity, you'd have to mail your materials, which involved additional labor to take additional steps; additional expense; and delays of as much as several days to reach from coast to coast.
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My organization, Homosexuals Intransigent!, issued a mimeograffed newsletter that started as 12 pages, then grew to a mimeoed magazine of as many as 48 pages. To produce these materials took at least the following steps.
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• Write the material;
• type the stencil;
• proofread it;
• correct the stencil;
• mimeograf each page;
• collate all pages;
• staple (additional expense);
• fold;
• insert into an envelope (additional expense);
• type a label (additional expense);
• affix the label, or handwrite the address;
• seal the envelope;
• stamp it (BIG additional expense);
• take it to a mailbox;
• wait for it to be delivered.
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That took manpower and money. We had little of either, but just enuf to get our message out to small numbers of people. We couldn't afford to buy ads in newspapers, magazines, radio, or television, any of which would reach many more people but access to which was limited to people who had money for advertising. The publishers and broadcasters were the gatekeepers, and the gate was closed to anyone without money.
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In recent years, there have developed other gatekeepers to the levers of power: lobbyists; news directors; talk-show and public-affairs bookers; and everyone else involved in reaching massive numbers of people in a single appearance. The more people you had to reach, the more money you needed to have. Fame could sometimes substitute for money, in getting a spokesman onto major-media news segments, public-affairs programs, and talk shows, or win interviews from print publications. But if you were neither rich nor famous, you had little to no chance to get any message to any significant number of people.
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In refusing to enlarge the House of Representatives since 1912, Congress has ensured that Congressional districts (now over 717,000 constituents per district; 214,000 in 1912) get ever bigger, so that reaching any substantial portion of a district's voters would seem to require huge amounts of money for political ads. That meant that the rich were in the catbird seat. They could get special access to politicians who needed their money in campaign contributions, a type of corruption short of legally-defined bribery. Editors and publishers of print publications, and the owners and producers of broadcast stations or networks also had power to persuade politicians to favor them, for fear of being denied access to their audiences. The few, and the rich, got to control what the many got to see and hear.
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No longer. The Internet has changed all that, as we have seen in recent weeks, with the U.S. Congress being forced to retreat from an Internet-censorship bill favored by the newly-former gatekeepers to power, the publishers and producers of copyrighted intellectual property. The new media are already too powerful to be crushed, because of their ubiquity. The great preponderance of the population now has access to the Internet, in home or elsewhere — work, school, public libraries.
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The online petition can no longer be casually dismissed by officeholders, because the quality of the petitions has improved. Name, address, phone number, or other confirmable identifying information now accompanies an electronic signature. And professionally managed petitioning groups keep databases of people favorably disposed to their stance on issues. Credo, MoveOn, and the like have mailing lists to which they can dispatch appropriate alerts, and with one click, a person can add his or her name (with ID) to a petition that can gather tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of signatures in a matter of days, even hours.
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To reach vast audiences now, people and movements need not struggle arduously and at great expense actively to reach out. Instead, they merely post something to Twitter, Facebook, and the like, and passively reach huge numbers of people who exert themselves to get those messages and then act upon something they favor.
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It's a new age, and the Koch Brothers cannot control it. They cannot buy off millions, They cannot shut down websites. They cannot intimidate legislators or public executives with threats of vast outpourings of paid propaganda, because people can turn off political ads with the press of a button on a television remote, and hang up on robocalls. The active/passive dynamics and relationships have been magically, technologically reversed. Tens of millions of people are no longer passive recipients of other people's messages. They actively seek out the information they need to decide among the proposals they also seek out in their quest for solutions to the problems that concern them. They don't have to let other people define the issues for them and dominate the public discourse.
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The game has changed, and the Koch Brothers may soon find themselves on the outside looking in to the real halls of power. Isn't that sad?
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:13 PM

 
Romney's 36%, Gingrich's 41% "Wins". I remarked here January 2d that the primary system yields extreme results because of the tiny number of people who vote, split multiple ways. The New Hampshire and South Carolina results confirm my point. The "big winner" in NH was Mitt Romney, who won 36% of the vote. By any measure you care to name, that is NOT a victory in a genuine democracy, but misses a majority by 14%.
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Newt Gingrich's 'triumph' in SC amounted to 41% of the votes cast. That, again, is much less than a majority.
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Moreover, the turnout in SC was about 600,000. The voting-age population is about 3.6 million. So the total turnout for the SC open primary was 1/6th of the voting-age population: about 17%. 41% of 17% is 7% of the electorate. How dare we consider ourselves a democracy when there is no runoff in the primary system, but tiny groups control the ballot?
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On January 2d I also pointed out the absurd bars to ballot access in the Virginia primary, and mentioned that five Republican candidates who did not make it onto that ballot sued to be added. That lawsuit was decided this past week, and the five remain excluded. What kind of democracy bars major candidates from the ballot? — indeed, bars ANY serious candidate from the ballot? A rotten democracy, like Britain's "rotten boros" of old.
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On December 30th, I speculated that:

At this point, the possibility of Republicans getting their act together and defeating President Obama appears to be nil. Some other candidate would have to come to the fore, during the primary season or at the convention if the convention can, somehow, deadlock.

I also addressed the possible drafting of a new candidate in convention on other occasions, as far back as November 28th. Today I saw a commentary on The Huffington Post by Howard Fineman that addressed the open-convention possibility:

Michael Steele, the former Republican national chairman who oversaw the writing of the party's nominating rules in 2010, told The Huffington Post [last] night that the chances of an open -- that is, undecided -- GOP convention in Florida next August are now "50-50" after Newt Gingrich's victory in South Carolina.

"It's a real possibility," Steele told HuffPost. "Right now I'd say it's 50-50. The base wants its chance to have their say. They aren't going to want it to end early, before they get their chance, which means that the process could go all the way to Tampa."

In looking for that quote today, I found that various people have talked about a deadlocked convention, as early as a November 5th article on the Rightwing website Newsmax.com. The hope was that a candidate not now in contention in the primaries such as my state's Governor, Chris Christie, Indiana's Governor, Mitch Daniels, or Florida's former Governor, Jeb Bush, could then be nominated in convention.
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In the Newsmax story from November, Michael Steele sees a problem with the scenario of a new arrival's picking up the party's fallen standard (in every sense), the shortness of the time between an August convention and November election. That would, he says, argue for the convention's somehow managing to agree on one of the frontrunners from the primary season. That does not, however, mean that a convention that saw its hopes of winning the White House as exceeding slim with either (all) of the deadlocked present candidates, could not dump them both (all) and go for a new face.
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I addressed, almost hopefully, the possible return of the convention to real importance, on January 4th.

We may, in short, see a rejection of a candidate who wins a narrow plurality of the primary vote, and a restoration of the power of the convention as a national institution.

Such a development would be salutary to the political future of this Republic.
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We tend to think that the Presidential primary system has always been with us, but it is actually a fairly recent development. Legally binding primaries did not exist before 1968. Before then, most primaries were "beauty contests" in which people made a name for themselves but did not win delegates morally pledged nor, esp., legally required to vote for them in convention.
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There is no reason whatsoever we should retain the primary system as it now works — or does not work. The major parties are NOT organs of government, so their internal decisionmaking process should not be funded by taxpayers. Moreover, only small minorities turn out to vote and tiny  minorities decide the "winner". If the "winner" of a primary system that few people determine is a particular candidate, the loser  is the Nation.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 5:05 PM

 
Another Two Bite the Dust. The Republican field has been narrowed by two more worthless candidates, one a decent man — who thus had no chance of being nominated by an indecent party — the other a dunce whose stupidity not even the most rabid Radical Rightists could defend.
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We are left with Richie Rich, Ricky Religious, Newt the Mack, and the Libertarian Loon, little Ronnie Paul. What a field! What a great thing for this Republic, that one of the two major parties has nothing but bad candidates to vote for!
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How is Richie Rich supposed to win the support of even the middle class, now that they see that this mega-millionaire, with a net worth of over $200 million, pays 15% income tax — less than they do! — and that he made over $300,000 in speaker's fees — which he called "not much" — and that he admits that he has "invested" in the Cayman Islands, one of the world's most notorious offshore tax havens? It was bad enuf that Romney admitted that some of his company's investments produced the closure of businesses and layoffs of thousands of workers, even as that company, Bain Capital, walked away with millions of dollars in fees from those very businesses. He could hide behind the "free-enterprise" system there: 'that's just the way capitalism works, and I am not going to apologize for capitalism.' That threadbare excuse has power only among the Radical Right set, whose Pavlovian response is always to defend free enterprise, no matter how abusive Monster Capitalism proves.
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Now Newt Gingrich, puffy playboy, is revealed as a degenerate, who wanted his second wife to agree to an "open marriage" so he could have convenient, no-fault, multiple adultery in which he need not sneak around nor fear ruinous divorce with a punitive property settlement predicated on his adultery.
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Rick Santorum,, who put his children thru the horror of seeing a dead baby, the result of a miscarriage, is trying not to be seen as the freak he is. Some people make excuses for that truly grotesque action. But how many Americans have EVER taken a miscarried fetus home to show the kiddies? Very, very few, I'm sure. Barbara Bush apparently showed her son, George W., a miscarried fetus preserved in a glass jar! (We do not, however, know how old Dubya was at the time, because Matt Lauer did not follow up for details, but rushed away from that grotesque incident at warp speed. It would seem some very prominent Republicans are freaks. Why are they not called on their freakishness?
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In any case, the Republican field is now halved from its condition after the early (and perhaps unwisely premature) withdrawal of Tim Pawlenty — tho anyone who doesn't have the guts to stick it out is unfit to be President, so our preposterously extended, grueling selection process does serve to eliminate the weaklings. Bizarrely, we see here the very "survival of the fittest" (Darwinist evolution) that the Republican base does not believe in.
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Of course, the remaining candidates are not really fit to be President, so the Republican base might still have a point if the Republican nominee, if it be one of these clowns, loses the general election badly, as seems very likely. The polls that show a close contest against Obama are almost assuredly wrong, and the only way Tepublicans have any chance whatsoever of winning the White House is if they can block hundreds of thousands of people from voting, which they sure are trying to do. And not just by discouraging people, but by actually enacting laws to bar as many as FIVE MILLION voters!
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If Republicans are really concerned, as Romney pretends, about people voting multiple times, why doesn't he just advocate an Iraq-style solution, indelible ink for the fingers of anyone who has voted? That's quick and simple, and I haven't heard any reports of people in Iraq getting the ink off in order to vote multiple times. We could create a Purple Badge of [Civic] Courage — a play on the universally-known phrase "Red Badge of Courage" from an esteemed writer from my city, Newark, NJ, Stephen Crane — by which people could show their civic-mindedness and encourage others by appearing in public with a proud, purple finger.
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This would show us visually the level of participation in elections by various communities, and at once encourage hesitant voters and reproach nonvoters. It would be, for media, "shorthand" evidence of voting levels, engagement, apathy, and willful abstention.
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Anyone who does not have a purple finger (or lite lavender for dark-skinned people, if purple would not stand out, which it probably would) could expect to be asked, repeatedly, "Why didn't you vote?", thus bringing community disapprobation to work for increased voting levels.
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Every State in the Union could have purple-finger laws in place by this November's election. The costs would be trivial. And people NOT entitled to vote would not want to be found to have a purple finger when the authorities come calling to investigate a claim of illegal voting.
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You want a foto ID? OK: take a digital picture of each voter, with purple finger, as s/he emerges from the voting booth, with the name of the voter inextricably connected electronically to the foto. No needless documents to collect, at a fee, in order to get another form of foto ID; no application to a state agency for a foto ID. No expense to the individual voter at all, just a totally trivial expenditure — esp. given our multi-billion-dollar national elections — for some ink and digital fotos to be entered into a database. Such a foto could thereafter be printed out alongside the voter's signature in the books we have to sign when we go to vote, updated for each time we vote. Simple, no?
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How much do you want to bet that Republicans will find some excuse not to go for it?
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:54 PM

 
Romney's "Dukakis Moment"? We all know that there's a certain amount of puffery, nonsense, and playing games with the truth if not outrite lying, in politics. But sometimes the hypocrisy is SO blatant that it torpedoes a candidate. With 1988 Democratic Presidential candidate Michael Dukakis (also a Governor of Massachusetts), that moment was when he did a foto-op in an M1 Abrams tank, despite a reputation for being at best disinclined to indulge the military and at worst for being hostile to the military.
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Now Mitt Romney has been caut in an appallingly disingenuous attempt to connect with people who have lost, or face losing, their jobs. What he said was so plainly, absurdly false — indeed the opposite of the truth — that rivals have landed hard on the hypocrisy, as well they should.
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He is shown on a CBS News video as saying:

I know what it's like to worry whether you're going to get fired. There were a couple of times I wondered if I was going to get a pink slip.

Rick Perry exposed the reality, that Mitt Romney not only has NEVER had to worry about his own job in the private sector, for being an extremely wealthy man, from a rich family, but that his business career actually entailed downsizing companies, bankrupting some, and throwing thousands of people out of work.

"Now I have no doubt that Mitt Romney was worried about pink slips — whether he was going to have enough of them to hand out because his company Bain Capital with all the jobs that they killed, I’m sure he was worried that he’d run out of pink slips," Perry told the crowd at Mama Penn’s restaurant.

Perry laid into Romney for heading a company which Perry alleged eliminated hundreds of South Carolina jobs.

"There is something inherently wrong when getting rich off failure and sticking it to someone else is how you do your business and I happen to think that’s indefensible," said Perry. "If you’re a victim of Bain Capital’s downsizing, it’s the ultimate insult for Mitt Romney to come to South Carolina and tell you he feels your pain, because he caused it."

Perry cited two South Carolina companies impacted by Bain Capital’s downsizing. Holson Burnes, a company controlled by Bain Capital in Gafney, shut down a photo album plant, causing 150 workers to lose their jobs after Bain Capital charged them $20 million in management fees. Perry also cited GS Industries in Georgetown, S.C., which Bain Capital merged with a company in Kansas City, resulting in the dismissal of 700 steelworkers in the two cities and the payment of $65 million in management fees.

And that's just two companies in one state that Romney's company ravaged. Someone needs to do a tally of Bain's reign of terror, and hang it around Romney's neck for all to see. The Wall Street Journal already did some of this investigation, altho the report I saw does not count the jobs Romney destroyed. Bizarrely, a radical free-enterprise website dares to cite damning statistics from the WSJ report, and then make excuses for them, and claim they show really good results! Here is what the Journal found.

The Wall Street Journal, aiming for a comprehensive assessment, examined 77 businesses Bain invested in while Mr. Romney led the firm from its 1984 start until early 1999, to see how they fared during Bain's involvement and shortly afterward.

Among the findings: 22% either filed for bankruptcy reorganization or closed their doors by the end of the eighth year after Bain first invested, sometimes with substantial job losses. An additional 8% ran into so much trouble that all of the money Bain invested was lost. * * *

The Journal's findings could provide fodder for both critics and supporters of Mr. Romney's presidential ambitions and of his role at Bain. Some experts, while conceding that available studies don't provide a direct comparison, said the rate at which the firms Bain invested in ran into trouble appears to be higher than experienced by some rival buyout firms during the era.

The lunatic writer, James Pethokoukis, at The Free Enterprise Blog, said:

So what does it all mean? Well, Romney was really good at what he did. And what he did, initially, was venture capital, providing dough to promising young firms. Then he shifted to private equity, which is a) using investor money and debt to take over a business, b) attempting to improve its profitability (which may mean cutting the workforce), and c) selling the business and, as the WSJ, puts it, "extracting fees and sometimes dividends."

Mr. Pethokoukis is an apologist for what I call "Monster Capitalism", in which all the harms done by free-market capitalism are trivialized, and the positive things are preposterously exaggerated. In regard to Romney's record in particular, Pethokoukis ignores the finding of the WSJ study that Bain Capital's record of bankruptcies was HIGHER than average.

[Repeat of a point made above, to show it in context with what I show below:] 22% either filed for bankruptcy reorganization or closed their doors by the end of the eighth year after Bain first invested, sometimes with substantial job losses. * * *

If the Journal analysis were limited to bankruptcies and closures occurring by the end of the fifth year after Bain first invested, the rate would move down to 12%. * * *

Academic research provides some basis to compare this performance. A study of buyouts by various firms globally found a 5% to 8% bankruptcy rate among target companies that were taken over from 1985 to 1999.

Think about that. If one uses the WSJournal's first figure, 22%, Bain's performance is from 2.75 to 4.4X worse than the average. If one uses the Journal's downwardly adjusted figure of 12%, it is still between 1.5 and 2.4X the average. That is NOT a stellar record of success for Romney's Bain Capital career.
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Romney has attempted to trivialize the profoundly destructive role he has played in the free market by saying he was not going to 'apologize for capitalism' or 'the free market' (I can't find the exact quote among early Google results).
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In response to criticism from Newt Gingrich, Romney said, "Doesn't he understand how the economy works? In the real economy, some businesses succeed and some fail." How is someone who accepts the inevitability of some level of economic disaster, in position to claim that President Obama bears special blame for the current economy? How is a man who bankrupted many businesses and cost thousands of workers their jobs, going to pose as savior of the economy and working people? It's absurd.
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That would be bad enuf, but for Romney to pretend to have been worried, himself, about being fired is just disgraceful. He is the scion of a wealthy father. Even if he had lost a job, that would have produced absolutely no hardship for him, given his family's, and his own, millions. Romney's present estimated fortune is in the neighborhood of $250 million! And he has just built an enormous house in California, at a time when millions of Americans have lost their modest homes to foreclosure. Romney has also claimed to be part of the middle class!
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All of this leaves a very bad taste in the mouth of Americans of modest means, who are at best holding on to their jobs and homes by the barest of threads.
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Romney's Mexican Roots. The Univisión national network TV news today addressed Mitt Romney's Mexican connection, the fact that his father, George, was born in Mexico (175 miles from the border with Texas) and did not come to the U.S. until age five. The story on Noticiero Univisión shows one paragraf on one page of a book Romney wrote, with two phrases underscored, to show what I take to be Romney's entire discussion of what Noticiero calls his "Raíces Mexicanas" (Mexican Roots).

In that paragraf, he claims that his family was in danger from Mexican revolutionaries, but there are to this day something like 50 Romney cousins still in a Mormon community in the Casas Grandes area of Mexico. They didn't run all the way to the United States.
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(My summary of that news story depends on my poor Spanish; but you can check the video yourself.) A distant cousin, Leighton Romney, is shown on camera saying that as far as he knows, Mitt Romney has never visited his father's Mexican place of birth. Hm. I have visited my father's place of birth. Another "Fundamentalist Mormon", in that settlement, Julián LeBarón, is heard to say that, in lite of Romney's family history of fleeing the U.S. to escape persecution, Mitt Romney's hostility to immigration of "indocumentados" (illegal immigrants) in the U.S. is "muy ofensivo". I'll let you guess what that means. LeBaron indeed refers to Romney as a "perseguidor": "persecutor".
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An earlier news story on this topic says:

But Romney hardly ever mentions his father’s roots in Mexico or the fact that he still has many distant relatives living in the country and it’s not surprising the subject does not come up more often. His family’s history there is controversial. Romney’s great-grandfather, Miles Park Romney, fled the U.S. to Mexico with a group of Mormons in 1885 to avoid anti-polygamy laws in America. And a Washington Post piece published in July detailed how his relatives have more open views on immigration than the former Massachusetts governor.

So Romney's Mexican connection is tenuous, of little more importance than John McCain's Panamanian connection. Both George Romney and John McCain were born to U.S. citizens, so were never citizens of any other country. Despite his privileged background, which would have enabled him to learn Spanish easily and, for him, inexpensively, I have never heard Mitt Romney speak Spanish. What kind of aspirant to high political office in the United States, takes no time nor trouble to appeal to the Hispanic community, the largest minority in the Nation? I know: a person who feels no connection to Hispanics' lives, and knows better than to expect any significant number of Latinos to vote for him. In that I haven't heard ANY of the Republican candidates say so much as one sentence in Spanish, the same observation holds for them too. The Republican Party doesn't care about minorities, but somehow believes that it can win the White House while paying not even lip service to a fourth of the electorate.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM

 
Evil Country. I have become profoundly disgusted with much that has happened to the United States in recent years, and now begin a series of commentaries about the immoral and repulsive things that have developed in what used to be a very decent country.
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For this first, brief discussion, let me address the disgraceful behavior of some late-nite TV talkshow hosts. Jay Leno tonite made a "joke" about a man who died in a hospital in India when rats chewed off part of his penis. That strikes Jay Leno as funny! He has made jokes about this awful story, which horrifies decent people, before. Tonite's "joke" was that the rats weren't greedy: they left the nuts to the squirrels. That is supposed to be funny? In what monstrous nitemare of a country?
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Jay Leno has done this kind of vile, infinitely contemptible thing before. Several times some years ago he made jokes about a horrible murder, in which a woman killed her husband by running him over with a car, then backing up over him to make sure he was dead. That is the stuff of "comedy" for the degenerate, inhuman, subhuman piece of excrement that is Jay Leno. But he could not make such "jokes" if society roundly condemned him whenever he did so, and demanded he be fired, could he?
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Society does NOT react with any indignation whatsoever over such monstrousness, because society has become monstrous. Death is funny. Murder is funny. Being killed by vermin is funny. In what decent country would any of these things be funny? Answer: none. No decent country would TOLERATE such disgraceful behavior.
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Later this same nite, Jimmy Kimmel Live simulated aggressive sex between an Incredible Hulk doll and a Barbie doll! Has Kimmel lost his mind? Will there be any public outcry about the tastelessness of such an absolutely needless and pointless, soft-core pornograffic display?
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There is so much that is ugly and inappropriate on television nowadays. A gifted, intelligent talkshow host, Craig Ferguson, fills his commentary and interviews with explicit references to sexual organs — over and over again, in interviews with women as freely and unabashedly as with a man.
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Ferguson also made lite of the sexual mutilation, and probable death, of a kangaroo, in making a toy of a pair of kangaroo testicles given to him by the degenerate Hollywood beast, Carrie Fisher. For MONTHS, Ferguson made this detestable (yes, that was -able) souvenir the center of dozens and dozens of 'jokes', even sending them to the North Pole so he could later talk about them being reduced in size when they returned.
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Apparently killing a defenseless animal and sexually mutilating the corpse is the stuff of "comedy" in this depraved society. Again, there was no vast outpouring of public disgust with this "humor", because the Nation has become fundamentally debauched by the ugly, inhuman insanity of Hollywood. We have been trained to think that nothing should ever be condemned as tasteless or just plain evil. Freedom of speech has become the highest value, no matter how coarsened public discourse may become. Killing animals is funny. I call this "Jeffrey Dahmer humor", in that Dahmer was reported to enjoy torturing and killing small animals. Now the killing of animals and murder of people is something to laff at — in the United States of Insanity.
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The coarseness of media today is astonishing. Virtually every nite, the network national and world news broadcasts are interrupted with commercials for Viagra, Cialis, and Levitra, with their inevitable warnings about 'erections lasting more than four hours'. Why is that on television, ever, but esp. during the network newscasts? Teenagers are assigned to watch the news for "current events", and must sit thru this oversexualized, vulgar trash JUST TO WATCH THE NEWS.
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Other commercials for disgusting things like mishaps to women who have had "vaginal mesh" surgically implanted that might have slipped, are all over the tube late at nite. We are regaled with the words "penis" and "vagina" dozens or even hundreds of times a day. This is not adult conversation. It is the intrusion of sexual vulgarity into our minds uncountable times a day. Lewd "jokes" are everywhere on sitcoms, esp. on CBS. For example, in the atrocious, revolting, tasteless and unfunny new entry 2 Broke Girls, one waitress turns to the other and says that she needs "nine inches" — before 9pm, when many teenage children are still up, watching what their parents assume are simply comedies, not raunchy sex farces.
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Commercials talk about disgusting medical conditions that most people do not suffer from and products that most people don't want to be slapped in the face with: erectile dysfunction, incontinence, urinary leakage, stool softening, menstruation, colon cleansing. Must EVERYONE hear these things discussed when they're just trying to watch the news or a lite comedy — even while eating? What has happened to this country?
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Is there a place for advertisements for such products? Sure, in appropriate magazines or appropriate sections of newspapers. Men's problems can be discussed in men's magazines; women's in women's magazines. Incontinence products can be discussed in the medical or science sections of general-circulation newspapers and magazines, and on the Internet. People who do NOT have such issues should not have to think of urine or fecal matter, erect male members, or anything else that would not have been permitted in polite, mixed company in this country 30 years ago.
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As a Nation, we have always had various defects, some quite serious, such as slavery, segregation, antihomosexual laws and raids, etc. But only in recent years has public discourse become appallingly ugly and "gross"ly tasteless. It's time for us to clean up our act, by condemning how vile and crude television has become.
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This series, "Evil Country", will address other topics related to the demeaning of public decency, such as murder as entertainment, economic inequity, the corruption of politics by obscene amounts of money, and on, and on. This will suffice for an introduction to the serious problem of a society that has lost its way, and no longer seems to know right from wrong, decent from indecent, fair from unfair.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM

 
And Another One Bites the Dust. I observed here December 30th that Michele Bachmann cannot possibly win the Presidency, and a general perception that she is not electable may help to explain her disastrous loss in her native state of Iowa. She won not one single county of 99. But Rick Santorum, who also cannot possibly win the Presidency against Obama, tied for first place with the megamillionaire Romney, so electability was not the deciding factor in Bachmann's rejection.
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The odd conclusion of the Iowa caucuses — a moderate and an arch-Conservative tying — shows again the unrepresentative nature of Iowa. Those caucuses did, however, do the Nation a service, in forcing one unqualified and unelectable candidate out of the race. Now media have one less unelectable fool to waste our time with. Herman Cain and Tim Pawlenty both dropped out before a single state's voters spoke, and so the Republican field has been narrowed from 9 to 6, including at least one more candidate who is likely to be forced out before the convention, Ron Paul.
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The general thinking now is that Mitt Romney's march to the nomination is inevitable and irresistible. But Romney is almost certainly not electable either, first because he is a Mormon, and a significant portion of the Republican base is hostile to Mormonism; and second because Romney is a moderate or Liberal Republican posing as Conservative, and few people, to none, are fooled. To the extent that the Republican Party of today hates moderates and Liberals, support of the rank and file in the general election will be unenthusiastic — so unenthusiastic that many Conservative Republicans will simply stay home. And since the Republican Party has to turn out every possible voter to win the White House, any significant rate of abstention by the Republican base would ensure Obama's re-election.
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How significant a reduction in turnout might occur? Well, Rick Santorum got 25% of the caucus vote in Iowa, representing the anti-Romney, true or Radical Conservative vote in Iowa. Iowa is not representative of the Nation, and its Republicans are much more conservative than Republicans nationally. If instead of 25%, the hardcore Conservative base of the Republican Party that adamantly rejects Romney is 10% of the Party, that should still be well more than enuf to render Mitt Romney, like his father, George Romney, a mere footnote in Presidential electoral history. The elder Romney was also a moderate, at a time when the Republican Party was much less Radical Conservative than it is today. He dropped out of the race, and Richard Nixon became President. Nixon would, today, be regarded as too far Left to be electable. What chance does Romney the Younger have in the hyper-Conservative Republican Party of today? We shall see.
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I bet a nickel that even if Romney wins the nomination, it will be by less than an overwhelming proportion of primary voters; and another nickel that if he wins the nomination, he will lose the general election.
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Perhaps Pawlenty should not have dropped out so early. And perhaps if Romney does not win enthusiastic support from the rank and file, and (my state's governor) Chris Christie continues to refuse a "draft", Pawlenty can prove an acceptable compromise candidate in the convention. We may, in short, see a rejection of a candidate who wins a narrow plurality of the primary vote, and a restoration of the power of the convention as a national institution.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:41 PM

 
Ignore Iowa. Why do media pay so much attention to the Iowa caucuses? Even tho major media have pointed out that Mike Huckabee won Iowa last time but lost the nomination badly, and that Reagan and Bush the Elder didn't win Iowa, they still waste tons of precious time on this absurdly unimportant event. NBC Nitely News today pointed out that the Iowa caucus vote is "too white, too evangelical, too rural" to be representative of the Nation, but that observation was contained in a report about the Iowa caucuses! That is, Andrea Mitchell openly questioned whether we should be spending the very time on this, that she herself was spending!
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In like fashion, the first primary is in New Hampshire, another extremely unrepresentative state, also too white and too rural to be regarded as a bellwether of the national vote.
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In Virginia, the insanity of how candidates are chosen even for the primary ballot was revealed when only two of the nationally recognized Republican candidates, Mitt Romney and Ron Paul, qualified last week to appear on the March 6th — MARCH — primary ballot. The remaining five candidates (Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, and John Huntsman) have joined together to sue for inclusion on the ballot. Why on Earth would a March primary ballot be closed in December? Now these excluded Republican candidates know how minor parties feel about procedures adopted by the major parties to limit ballot access against Third Parties.

"All five of us are saying ... this should not be a gauntlet to figure out how you can make it virtually impossible to run for president," Gingrich said. "This ought to be a system that enables the voters to decide who they would like to have run for president."

But it's OK to block minor parties from the general election ballot by similar mechanisms, eh? If ever the public has hungered for alternatives to the crappy major parties, it is now.
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The whole process of selecting a President has gone off the rails. Could we purposely design  a worse system? That would take some doing.
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The primary system was intended to democratize the electoral process, but has had exactly the opposite effect. Whereas the "smoke-filled room" of old was controlled with professional pols who understood things like balancing the ticket to appeal to the widest possible audience, the primary process gives tiny groups of radical loons the power to control the ballot in the general election, because almost nobody votes in primaries. As a percentage of voting-age citizens, primaries now attract only 8% of Democrats and 11% of Republicans (see the first line-graph at the NYTimes article, "Primary Voter Turnout Stays Low, but More So for Democrats" from September 2010).
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In a two-way contest, a candidate need attract only 6% of Republicans or 5% of Democrats. In the current contest, a seven-candidate field may divide 11% of the vote, which means that a 'big winner' need 'win' only 3% of the public, and a bare-winner need win only 1.6%. Do you see, now, why our politics are so crazy?
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The consequences have been dire, with the present Congress being the worst in recent times.

[Thomas Mann, senior fellow of governance studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington,] acknowledges there have been worse times for Congress, but he reaches back a very long way for a comparison.

"There were a few really bruising periods in American congressional history, not only the run-up to the Civil War, but also around the War of 1812," he says.

A Gallup poll published earlier this month found that just 11 percent of Americans approve of Congress' performance. A whopping 86 percent gave a thumbs-down. That's the lowest rating since Gallup started taking the public pulse on this issue in 1974. A similar poll conducted by The Associated Press registered a 12 percent approval rating, and a CBS/New York Times poll in October placed Congress' approval rating at 9 percent. * * *

[Mann summarizes:] "there have been battles, delays, brinkmanship — but nothing quite like this."

That's what happens when as little as 2% (or, at best, 10%) of the public decides a primary. If the moderates don't vote in the primaries, we get only immoderate candidates on the general-election ballot. And they have to stay immoderate once elected, even against their personal inclinations, to be able to win the next primary election in which radical loons control.
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What can we do? Here are some thoughts. You may have your own.
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(a) Part of the problem Nate Silver speaks to in the NYTimes article cited above is declining percentages of voters who identify with a particular party and register in it for purposes of voting in the primary (only 30% of the population registers as Democrats, and another 30% as Republicans, which means that 40% of the population are ineligible to vote in a closed primary). If 40% of the electorate is ineligible to vote in primaries, the closed primary election as an institution is intrinsically undemocratic, so should be abolished.
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(b) Retain open primaries, but boost participation. Probably the easiest way to do that is simply to forbid anyone to vote in the general election if they do not also vote in the primary. That would not require people to register with a given party if we make all primaries open primaries. Independents could vote for a candidate of either party, and voting machines would be set to permit one vote, regardless of party. If legislators think an open primary inadvisable, in that some people of one party might vote for whom they perceive as the weakest candidate in the other party, then it is perfectly within the power of that state to abolish its own primary.

If that sets off a wave of cancellations of primaries, so much the better. Let each party follow its own procedure for selecting its own candidates, be it an Internet poll, mail-in ballot, local meetings (like the Iowa caucuses), a convention in each electoral district and Congressional district, a statewide convention — whatever. The costs of all those methods for selecting the candidate of a private political organization should be borne by that private organization alone, NOT by taxpayers.
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(c) All states can abolish the primary system, open or closed, altogether. I repeat that political parties are private organizations, not organs of government. Why should taxpayers have to pay for those private organizations' internal decisionmaking?
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(d) Of course, if we had term limits, in the last legal term, an elected official need not kowtow to the loons, but would be free to vote his conscience. I'll bet the people who want a constitutional amendment to put term limits in place for Congress haven't thought about that.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 12:16 AM