The Spencerian

If You're Wondering Why People Hate The Media, This Is Why

by Benjamin J. Kirby

If you ever wondered why people hate the media, this is why.  

This was the home page for "Florida's Best Newspaper" a few hours ago:

The big header on the left is the "story" of former professional wrestler Hulk Hogan, his sex tape, and some lawsuit nobody gives a damn about.  On the right is a heartbreaking story of Army Spc. Brittany B. Gordon who died in Afghanistan.  She is the first woman from the Tampa Bay area killed there.  

Like all the stories of the men and women who have died fighting our wars, it is tragic and awful.

And why it is minimized to make room for about as tawdry and cheap a story as you could find, I'll never know.  

Shame on the Tampa Bay Times.  Specialist Gordon deserved better.  As did we all.

If You Withhold Your Vote, You're Doing It Wrong

by Benjamin J. Kirby

A couple of days ago, I linked to the Conor Friedersdorf piece in The Atlantic about the ongoing drone strikes in North Waziristan and Pakistan.  I called it a "must-read":

The bottom line is that through this country's ongoing unmanned Predator Drone strike program which has escalated under President Obama, we are now in the full-time business of terrorizing innocent people Pakistan.  There's a horrific, ugly irony in combating terror cells with what amounts to terrorism.  

To be frank, I think the article, on the heels of this Bureau of Investigative Journalism study which unsurprisingly finds that the drone strikes are causing mass trauma among civilians, misses a larger, more complex point.  Maybe several points.

In the end, I offered an answer to Fridersdorf's question about whether or not my own children are terrorized by the neverending buzzing of drones overhead:

It's dramatic, I suppose, but Conor's question in the article is ultimately a fair one.  No, my kids do not jump at the sound of someone knocking on the door.  No, I don't live in fear that I'll be bombed out of the blue by an unseen, silent enemy.  

I'm grateful every day for it.  I really, really am.  I live in a comfortable world, and I am truly grateful for it, and I am grateful for the life I can give my children.

What is becoming apparent is that the continued drone strike operations in Pakistan have almost nothing to do with that comfort.  Indeed -- and disturbingly -- they may be contributing to just the opposite.

The point was we probably ought to stop -- or at the very least, re-think -- this whole drone strike program.    

It's a troubling thing, to be sure.

But just because it's troubling, doesn't mean I won't vote for Obama.  

For Conor Friedersdorf, apparently it does:

The whole liberal conceit that Obama is a good, enlightened man, while his opponent is a malign, hard-hearted cretin, depends on constructing a reality where the lives of non-Americans -- along with the lives of some American Muslims and whistleblowers -- just aren't valued. Alternatively, the less savory parts of Obama's tenure can just be repeatedly disappeared from the narrative of his first term, as so many left-leaning journalists, uncomfortable confronting the depths of the man's transgressions, have done over and over again.   

Keen on Obama's civil-libertarian message and reassertion of basic American values, I supported him in 2008. Today I would feel ashamed to associate myself with his first term or the likely course of his second. I refuse to vote for Barack Obama. Have you any deal-breakers? 

How is this not among them?

This article has been nagging at me all day.  (Good thing I shared it with Matt, so he could be annoyed, too.)

First of all, if you withhold your vote, you're not actually protesting -- you're giving a vote to the other guy.  Friedersdorf tells us he plans to vote for libertarian candidate Gary Johnson.

Look, if you are either withholding your vote or voting for Gary Johnson or some other no-shot candidate because of the United States drone strike program in Pakistan, then you have to believe that Obama is just doing it as a terrorist act.  You have to believe that he's doing it to kill and maim civilians in Pakistan and for no other reason.  You have to believe that he's driven to do this perhaps by an extreme interpretation of his Christian faith.  You have to believe, basically, that Obama himself is a terrorist.

I don't.  I think the drone strike program is causing a lot of problems -- a lot of bad problems, as Friedersdorf reported.  But I don't think Obama is doing it specifically to terrorize innocent people in Pakistan. 

Indeed, Friedersdorf reported that the drones are terrorizing the civilian population.  But we have to believe that this is collateral damage.  It's terrible, it's awful, it is even unacceptable -- but the bombings by drones in Pakistan has to be doing something in the name of eliminating terrorists.  

If it came to light that Obama was just bombing Pakistan to provoke Pakistanis, or because he was some sort of hateful extremist, not only would I not vote for him, I'd actively work against him.   

Where I come down on this is basically in-line with mistermix at Balloon-Juice and Erik Loomis at Lawyers Guns & Money.  The former:

But I know that becoming one of the 60%+ of people who won’t vote in this election is about the most feeble possible protest imaginable. Not to mention that “double Guantanamo” Romney’s foreign policy is far more likely to lead us to more war (with Iran for starters).

...and the latter:

If either major party offered a platform opposed to killing Pakistanis through the air, that would be great. Instead, we face a choice between someone who has continued the terrible policies of his predecessor and someone who is openly campaigning to kill even more brown people. So even on this issue, there is a slight difference.

Given the reality of American life, I can either make myself feel morally clean, vote for Jill Stein or Gary Johnson and effectively give 0.5 votes to Mitt Romney, a man who would destroy the rights of poor people in this country while make the life of poor people around the world even worse. Or I can swallow my pride, vote for Obama, and work to change the Democratic Party and political life in this country so we can get to a point where we don’t have a bipartisan consensus that killing random Muslims is actually a good thing.

First of all, we need to understand that a vote for Mitt Romney is a vote for the failed policies of the Bush Administration, to include but not limited to more war, almost assuredly with Iran.  Yes, it's horrible that innocent (by Conor's reporting) villagers in Pakistan are being driven mad and are dying needlessly from drone strikes ordered by a Democratic President.  

All of this will be worse if Mitt Romney is elected.

Second of all, withholding your vote -- or voting for a sure loser, and Friedersdorf admits that Johnson will lose -- is simply not the way to communicate protest in a participatory democracy.  And your vote actually matters.  This is djw, also from Lawyers Guns & Money:

Erik’s recent post got me thinking about my own vote for Nader in 2000 (which, like Erik, I soon regretted). I had decided to vote for Gore weeks earlier; I’d gone to the polls with every intention of voting for Gore. I was near the end of five years of irrational rage about the Welfare Reform act, and since I couldn’t take it out on Clinton again, I took it out on Gore. That was, at the time, my “dealbreaker.” In hindsight, my rage was deeply irrational not because I was wrong about the evils of the policy, necessarily, but because I was irrationally and single-mindedly focused on Clinton. The first alternative, which I barely acknowledged at the time, would have been to focus my rage against Republican legislators, who obviously passed the damn bill. But more importantly, my rage should have been directed to a significant degree against my fellow American citizens, whose political attitudes and values rendered Clinton’s decision to sign that bill a canny political move. 

Indeed, all of this is tap-dancing dangerously close to the days of Campaign 2000, when you heard more than you could bear: Gore and Bush are just alike...  Yeah, and how'd that thinking work out for us?  

And so registering a "protest vote" (which I maintain doesn't actually exist as a thing, because... who'd really notice?) does little but deliver even worse outcomes against which you were protesting to begin with.

Before I get to Matt's more difficult questions about "deal-breakers", let me say this:  Is the drone strike program a bad idea?  Yeah, probably.  Almost assuredly, yes.  But I don't feel as though I'm fully informed about it.  Here are some hard questions we need to ask before make a serious "deal-breaker" decision regarding something as sacrosanct as our vote.  

People in Pakistan are being driven mad by the constant buzzing of drones, living in fear.  Okay.  That's truly awful.  But how many known terrorists are living in those villages now?  How many have been killed in how many strikes?  How many are left?  To what degree did the strikes make us safer?  Did they at all?  Who were the terrorists killed and what were they plotting?  At what level had they completed their planning, or had even begun to operationalize it?

I'm not asking those questions facetiously or snarkily.  I think the answers are worth knowing before you throw your vote away in "protest."  I also think there's a good chance we'll never really know the full answers, because so much of this is conducted in secret.  That's too bad for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that it allows people like Fiedersdorf to conveniently exclude it when writing an article for The Atlantic.

It's all very ugly, and it's not a nice thing to think about, but wouldn't it change your mind just a little bit to know that the drone strike program is driving whole villages mad, but they have also killed, say, a hundred active terrorists with plots to harm Americans?  What about active terrorists who had the parts to a bomb?  What about active terrorists who'd had communications with counterparts in Asia?  Africa?  Europe?  America?  

And so for my answer about "deal-breakers" and who we vote for, I once again go back to my own kids.  For me, it is the environment (and I use that term broadly, to include the economic impacts as well as the impact on energy production and consumption).  Obama hasn't been perfect on this issue (I had to cringe a bit in his new two-minute ad when he mentions "clean coal", a thing that has been fairly well proven to be -- mostly -- nonsense), but he's leaps and bounds better than, well, pretty much any of his predecessors until you get to Teddy Roosevelt.

If President Obama were to, overnight, somehow turn into, well, Mitt Romney, then I may well sit on my hands, or at least write in a name. 

Environmental stuff matters to me because it is the thing we can do something about now -- we have the technology, we have the capacity -- but it is really about preserving the world for Emeline and Finn -- and for kids everywhere.  The thing with the environment, for me, is multi-fold.  

One, with respect to the bombings in Pakistan, at least we can quantify with a fair bit of accuracy the collateral damage.  We know how many villages are destroyed -- worthwhile or not.  With respect to the environment, we have no idea what sort of damage we will incur on any given part of the world now and more importantly in the future if we take no action.  That, to my mind, is in and of itself a greater moral failing.  In other words, it's worse to do nothing and not know how much you've destroyed in the future than it is to know exactly what you're destroying today.  Tough call, but there you go.  

Two, we know what to do.  We don't necessarily agree on it, but we at least know the barriers to real reforms in environmental and energy policy.  (A large part of it is big oil money and the lobbyists it buys, which is another sort of moral failing, but that's getting into the weeds a bit.)  

Finally, the idea that you can "fix" the environment or not is absurd.  It's an ongoing, evolving struggle.  It is the kind of complex, ever-changing decision we hire presidents to make.  For me, I'll be judging a successful measure of whether or not we're on the right track by seeing what kind of car my kids will drive.  That's at least 13, 14 years away.  Will they be driving inefficient, gas-fueld cars?  Or will we have done the right things today so that my kids are driving something better tomorrow?  

After all, this is really about them.

Yes, I'm talking about kids who are being bombed out of their homes in Pakistan, too.  

And we all know there's only one chance for those bombings to stop and for those kids to be safe -- and that is through a second Obama Administration.

A Plague On Both Your Houses

by Matt Spence

Ben, you've gone and done it.  I know you sent me this article from the Atlantic solely to provoke me, to bring out my inner Mercutio.  Congratulations, it worked. 

Can I sympathize with Connor Friedersdorf for his exasperation over the "lesser of two evils" choice that American two-party politics lays at many a voter's feet?  Yes, I can.  Instead of getting into the weeds of the legality, morality, constitutionality and  devastating consequences of drone strikes or indefinite detention, let's tackle the underpinning philosophical question.  The article puts the question to us specifically in regard to POTUS's actions on drone strikes and the like:

The future I hope for, where these actions are deal-breakers in at least one party (I don't care which), requires some beginning, some small number of voters to say, "These things I cannot support."  

Are these issues important enough to justify a stand like that?

I think so.

In a generic sense, what he is asking is this: are there single issues that can disqualify a candidate from consideration - regardless of whether or not you favor a majority of their other positions?

I am not sure whether you asked this of me facetiously or not, but I can tell you that it is very, very real.  Almost painful.  And millions of Americans ask themselves that question every election cycle.  I have - in a meandering and ill-formed way - tried to cover this issue before in this space from my own personal perspective of deep Catholic faith.  As a person who has had Catholic friends pray for my soul because of politics and had Catholic friends walk away from the Church because of the same, it is very real. So while I would like to discuss this philosophically, know that it comes from a deeply personal place.  I have struggled my whole life with reconciling my faith and my politics, my spiritual life and my political life.    

To step away from the personal for a minute, let me pose the question again.  Are there single issues that can disqualify a candidate from consideration - regardless of whether or not you favor a majority of their other positions? 

Sure.  I think so.  

Someone who believes in racial or ethnic superiority.  
Someone who has advocated the destruction of a nation.  
Someone who commits genocide. 

I would say that it is rational to disqualify any of those from consideration.  Is my personal list longer than that.  Probably.  But where do you draw the line?  What are the principles that cross into the dead zone?  Obviously, they are different for every voter.  For Connor Friedersdorf, the extra-judicial killing of foreign nationals (and American citizens) via drone strikes is over the line.  You have written passionately about it multiple times, but that clearly does not cross the threshold for you.  It is a matter of individual conscience and what forms each individual's conscience is different, and ever-changing.  

Really, what we are talking about is deal-breakers.  Everyone has them - whether it be in choosing a spouse, a house or a place to eat lunch.  Hell, in my travels around Iowa I met a lady who based her caucus support on the candidate with the best hair.  Seriously.  I guess baldness was her dealbreaker.  That's democracy for you.  Everyone's vote counts once, even Mable from Bettendorf, Iowa who liked John Edwards' hair.  

It is an interesting question - and worthy of discussion.  I hope you weigh in on it.  Still, I think there is a more interesting question here.  

What do you do when you decide that both candidates are unacceptable?  

Many Catholics find themselves in that very place today.  Consider these two pieces from the Catholic Bishops:

Considerations for budget policymaking:

1. Every budget decision should be assessed by whether it protects or threatens human life and dignity.

2. A central moral measure of any budget proposal is how it affects “the least of these” (Matthew 25). The needs of those who are hungry and homeless, without work or in poverty should come first.

Okay.  We're already at odds with ourselves in both parties.  Maybe I need to go deeper to find clarity?  Let's look at where those two considerations come from - Catholic Social Teaching, which offers us, among others, this quote:

The Catholic Church proclaims that human life is sacred and that the dignity of the human person is the foundation of a moral vision for society. This belief is the foundation of all the principles of our social teaching. In our society, human life is under direct attack from abortion and euthanasia. The value of human life is being threatened by cloning, embryonic stem cell research, and the use of the death penalty. 

Please tell me how either of those statements can be reconciled within the Democratic or Republican parties of today or the campaigns of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.  They can't.  So is it a plague on both your houses?  Is it a principled abstention by abdicating my responsibility to vote?  

What do you do when neither candidate meets your moral standards?  

PollTracker, Polling, and Please Make It Stop

by Benjamin J. Kirby

I just downloaded the PollTracker app on my iPhone, and I already I love it.  Please.  If you have an iPhone, and you care even a little bit about politics, go get this app.  Note: I am not a paid spokesperson for Josh Marshall or Talking Points Memo.

What I really wanted to talk about was this:

Exciting, right?

Yes, people are slowly starting to make up their mind, at least in race for president, and it's not going Mitt Romney's way.  Hey, no one loves the look of those little red and blue lines more than I do.  

But the GOP says their bloc is more enthusiastic -- and furthermore, they say there's no way those polls can possibly be right!  

In a strange way, I kind of agree with them.  

Remember: polls aren't a prediction of what folks will do -- they're a snapshot in time.  More than that, they provide an accurate retrospective, a good look back at what people where thinking when.  What was going on around May of 2011?  What was the American electorate collectively thinking (as much as we collectively think about anything)?  Whatever it was, that's where the Obama Campaign wants them to be again (Obama's numbers were up over Romney's by around 6 or 7 points).

You could ask a similar question about January of this year, too.  That's what the Romney folks are hoping for, because it's where he was effectively tied with Obama.  May of this year wouldn't be too bad a target for them, either.  

Will November look like May of this year?  Or May of last year?  

November of last year had Obama's numbers up by 2, by the way.  

#  # # # 

Of course, it can never just be the one thing.  I was all ready with my polling post, and then I saw this headlined at TPM: Romney To Obama: Please Stop Attacking My Business Record, Taxes.

Seriously?  Is this a joke?

“Our campaign would be — helped immensely if we had an agreement between both campaigns that we were only going to talk about issues and that attacks based upon — business or family or taxes or things of that nature,” Romney said, according to excerpts of an upcoming interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd released Friday.

Romney said he would prefer the campaigns “only talk about issues,” and claimed that “our ads haven’t gone after the president personally. … We haven’t dredged up the old stuff that people talked about last time around. We haven’t gone after the personal things.”

Really?  Really?  

So the Obama Campaign shouldn't talk about... Mitt Romney's business, even though the man is running a campaign based on his business experience.  

I guess I'll find the interview, but that sounds awfully whiny, don't you think?  Look, this is a presidential campaign.  I'm terribly sorry if Mittens didn't want to bother releasing his tax returns, or talk about his questionable time at Bain Capital, which outsourced jobs in order to reap a profit, but this is the big leagues.  

Hey, the Republicans say they have the momentum, they say their side is fired up.  Maybe.  I wonder how long they'll stay fired up when the guy leading the party and the top of the ticket is looking for an easy out.

President, Interrupted

by Benjamin J. Kirby

 I'm incensed over this: 

Maybe more than I should be, but I am.

Yes, I know it is in vogue to criticize the mainstream media for not doing what they should be doing, for not often asking hard questions.  There is validity to this, to be sure. 

But there is an order to things, and when it comes to the President giving remarks on immigration policy -- on anything, really -- we owe it to the democratically-elected leaders to hear them out.  

This guy -- Daily Caller "reporter" Neil Munro -- was just making an ass out of himself.

Someone told me that I probably shouldn't blog about this guy, that it'll just give him more of the attention he deserves.  But i'm with Eric Deggans of the Tampa Bay Times on this one: talking about it is important.  

Frankly, I'm not so sure this is a win for Munro, or Tucker Carlson's Daily Caller, or the whatever nonsense conservative agenda they're trying to push.  The point President Obama was trying to make in his earlier speech on the economy which so frustrated Dana Milbank (that bothered John Cole in that link above) was that Republicans have been obstructing his jobs plan.

Nothing in Obama’s speech came close to a proposal to fix the debt problem; he dealt with that only at the end of the speech — largely by complaining about Republicans’ refusal to consider higher taxes on the wealthy.

Obama alleged, correctly, that Republicans’ refusal to countenance tax increases scuttled the Bowles-Simpson plan and the Senate’s Gang of Six plan. He argued, also correctly, that Republicans’ refusal to budge on taxes is “the biggest source of gridlock in Washington today.” He’s on solid ground, too, in saying Republicans would end Medicare as we know it.

(By the way, only a guy as obtuse as Milbank could write an entire article detailing the Obama Plan and then argue in the same article that Obama doesn't have a plan.)

I hope this Munro guy gets more Twitter followers, or raises his Klout score, or the Daily Caller gets more hits, or whatever their goal really was.  They'd better hope for it, actually, because in reality, all they've really done is make the President's case for him.

The Birth of a Region: Tampa Bay Times and the Tampa Tribune

by Benjamin J. Kirby

Is the Tampa Bay Times going to by the Tampa Tribune?

Here's why I ask: turns out Berkshire Hathaway -- that's Warren Buffett's vaunted company -- bought up 63 newspapers from Media General today.

One Media General paper they didn't buy up?  The Tampa Tribune.

Now, I figure most folks wouldn't normally think that much about it, except that it's been pretty obvious -- starting with the name change -- that the former St. Petersburg Times (now Tampa Bay Times) is eyeing a move across the Bay.

And it's not just the name change.  

This tweet from Times political chief Adam Smith caught my eye:

  Adam Smith ‏@adamsmithtimes

Qstn for TpaBay: what does Tpa Trib do bettr thn TpaBayTimes? Where cn we improve? Email (asmith@tampabay.com), call 727-893-8241, or twt me

Really?  Since when is Adam Smith doing quality survey work for the Times?  Don't he and Al Ruechel have a candidate to interview? 

Anyway, to be fair, you'll want to read the piece from Eric Deggans (Times media critic) here.  Interesting that Paul Tash, the Times Chairman and CEO declined to comment on the purchase.  

Don't Let the Door... The Corpse of the Failed Media Slowly Becomes Seen

A lot of people ask me what is wrong with politics in America today.

[Aside: How many people actually ask me that?  It comes up more often than you'd think, I guess because I worked in Washington, in politics, and write this sort of sub-par blog.  In my view, this is the rough equivalent of a fifteen year-old boy publishing a diary about his emotions and general feelings of confusion, and then having someone ask him to diagnose serious, complicated mental disorders in broad swatches of the population.  There's no doubt most every fifteen year-old boy experiences a complex roller-coaster of confusing emotions, but that doesn't make him a sociologist or a head shrinker.]

I usually give one of two answers, or both, depending on where I think the person is coming from.

One centers around money in politics and campaigns.  I have yet to meet a reasonable thinking person of any political persuasion who thinks the way we fund political campaigns in this country is just hunky-dory.  It is a profoundly broken system and at some point someone is going to have to get serious about fixing it.  It will be an ugly job, but nothing less than the future of our country is at stake.

The other answer centers around our flat-lining media apparatus.  In many ways, this is a worse -- and more complicated -- problem than the money in politics issue.  Most folks know what to do about money in politics: limit it or take it out altogether.  And by "most folks," I mean everyone but the United States Supreme Court.

The point is, the problem of money in campaigns can be addressed by talking about money.  The problem with the media collapse is that you have to talk about people.  Money is money wherever you go, but people are different.

The role of the media and journalism in American society is not insignificant -- in fact, it is a critical piece of our democracy.  Somewhere along the way, we corporatized media outlets.  I don't know when this happened, I'm not an expert -- remember, fifteen year-old pimply teenager with issues -- but it definitely happened.  And as it has happened, the institution of journalism has gotten weaker.

This means the chief role of journalism and journalists -- that of watchdog -- in America has weakened.  A great example, if you need the proof, is that of Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone.  Taibbi is the only actual journalist I know who has called for -- and continually calls for -- the heads of the Wall Street crooks who drove the global economy into a very deep ditch (remember, I'm talking journalists, not bloggers -- bloggers offer something different, are something different; more on that in a moment). 

Why?  Why is the voice of the American conscience on the financial meltdown a guy who writes for a maganize that more likely has Lady Ga Ga and scenes from Bonaroo on the cover than anyone else?

There should have been a cacophony of editorials and columns and in-depth, Pulitzer-level articles on who did what, exactly, and who engaged in what criminal behavior when.  There should be a hundred thousand Matt Taibbis.  There are not.  [Note: I do know that there has been other good journalistic work on the issue of the financial meltdown; there has been not nearly enough, which is my point.]

Not for nothing, but I assign blame to the media with respect to institutional failures and lies leading up to the War in Iraq.  Journalism should also feed our national conscience, which with respect to the Iraq War and the profound lies told at the highest levels of government, it is apparently bankrupt. 

So this critical piece of America is quite possibly DOA.  Yes, bloggers have provided an important voice, but I don't consider blogging journalism.  This isn't a knock on bloggers -- many of whom do practice real journalism.  It's just that blogging and journalism are two different things.  Journalism is based on research and facts and interviews and often a painstaking process of fact-gathering.  Bloggging is just different (see: fifteen year-old). 

All of that to say this: For all the writing and sharing with the public journalists and media organizations are supposed to do, they've been pretty good at hiding the ugly parts of their demise. 

Slate has a great piece today on journalists who were fired or quit and... well, what they had to say about it.  Click the link.  Read it.  Digest it.  See what you think.  Draw your own conclusions. 

Hey, just like in journalism.  Now, let me tell you about my emotions...

RIP: David Broder

Pulitzer-prize winning columnist David Broder of the Washington Post died today.  He was 81.

I think Broder got kind of a bum rap from my fellow progressive writers and bloggers.  It's true, he had a phrase named after him -- "high broderism" -- and in fact, he deserved it.  But the thing about phrases like that is that they have a large element of truth. 

High broderism is more or less bipartisanship for the sake of bipartisanship.  Doesn't matter if one idea is actually better than the other -- all that matters is meeting halfway.  Compromise is king.  This thinking is the protective buffer around an insider-elite in Washington, D.C.  We D.C. beltway-types know better than you... if only you'd compromise...

It can drive you nuts, because it distracts from advocacy of really good ideas, no matter where they come from.

I spent a good deal of time in Washington, and I always had a pretty healthy mix of distaste for, and longing to be a part of the beltway elite.  You can't help it -- evil as they are, you want into that special club (and a guy like me was never, ever getting in -- at least not above board; maybe working the front desk taking tickets or checking coats or something...)

I kind of liked reading Broder.  I frequently disagreed with him, and when he was in "full broderism" mode, it drove me nuts.  But he was great, and there was rarely a time when I read something was wasn't left at least thinking.   

He and his family will be in our thoughts.

A New Resource in the Florida Redistricting Saga

If you're like me, you kind of fudged your way through Amendments 5 and 6 in the last election.  Oh, you knew they were important, and you checked out the very well done Fair Districts Florida website to learn all you could.  (Click here to read about Fair Districts Florida, why it's a good thing they were successful in having Amendments 5 and 6 pass, and find the link to the ballot language that passed).  For the record, here is the far less impressive Florida House Redistricting Committee website.  Sorry, guys.

I should have known a dude as ambitious as Peter Schorsch of Saint Petersblog would come up with a good website to track what's happening with redistricting here in Florida, and he has: Inside the Lines.

“Inside the Lines” offers the latest news, commentary and information on Florida’s reapportionment process, which is in the initial stage of a two-year process, culminating in the redrawing of the state’s Congressional and Legislative district boundaries.

Follow them on Twitter @insidethelines1.

Well, leave it to Peter to fill a vacuum.  I mean, come on: who else was doing this?  

The usual and increasingly less necessary Peter Schorsch caveats in a moment, but first let me say, I have no idea how the guy does it: he runs Saint Petersblog, of course, on which he's kindly and generously promoted this little blog a lot more than he's needed to; Battleground Tampa Bay, which I think sometimes focuses a bit much on the Tampa side of the bay, but that's me being picky -- it's really quite good; and now he's got this deal.  On top of all the other stuff I know he's got a lot going on with respect to politics and campaigns.  

You may have strong personal feelings about Peter -- everybody I've met that knows him sure does -- but you have to admit, the guy works pretty damn hard. 

I've said it before: Peter's got enemies.  In fact, his most recent back-and-forth with Irreverent View's Chris Ingram made the Michael Hussey/Kenneth Quinnell duel look like sunshine and lollipops at Disney.  

The apparent object of Mr. Ingram's ire is Michael Cifti, who is running for Tampa City Council.  Mr. Ingram has equated Mr. Cifti with, well, squirrel poop.  And I gather that Peter has Mr. Cifti as a client.  This has... displeased Mr. Ingram, per this post on Mr. Ingram's blog.  

This was a Twitter battle of epic proportions, with Mr. Ingram (@IrreverentView) doing some pretty heavy baiting of Peter (@SaintPetersblog) with respect to Peter's previous personal and legal issues.  I was disappointed that Peter resorted to violent language in the comments of Mr. Ingram's blog post ("Pray you don’t see me in an alley with no witnesses. Pray for that."  Poor form, Peter.)  But I was ultimately pleased that he "surrendered" (inasmuch as he was, well, too busy to keep going).  In fact, you have to give the decision to Peter on this one, if only because Mr. Ingram's dislike for Mr. Cifti makes him borderline irrational. 

What a distraction.  A delicious, hilarious, awesome distraction.  

Anyway, back on planet Earth, a lot of people will tell you that whatever it is the triumvirate of evil -- Haridoplos, Cannon, and Scott -- decided to merge, downsize, privatize, or cut will be the big news out of Tallahassee.  And it'll be big news, but it won't be the big news. 

The big news will be redistricting.  The budget cuts will hurt, and they'll get a lot of attention -- yes, including from me -- but this redistricting thing changes the face of Florida politics and government for a generation (and certainly has national ramifications as well).  Check out the new website, and we'll hopefully learn something together about this complex, but terribly important issue. 

Did the Debt Commission Have the Internet: Fun Graphics Sunday

You may or may not have noticed, but everybody's all riled up about the national debt.  The country currently owes -- in large part, China -- 10 trillion dollars. 

We liberals don't want to touch Social Security, the big national expenditure, and the conservatives don't want to raise taxes on wealthy fat cats or cut big spenders like the Defense Department, even though you've got to fill the hole with money from somewhere.  Once you get beyond this seeming impasse, it's tough to figure out what you might cut and where you might hold the line.

I'm going to give you all the fun links for today, but first let me just say that this is a weird debate to me, at least politically.  It should be a winner for Democrats, but once again we seem incompetent in the face of angry Republicans.  Why?  My liberal and progressive colleagues chalk it up to Obama trying to "compromise" from the center and only getting bullied by the GOP wingnuts eve worse.  I'm not so sure that's it. 

I think it's a fear of looking beyond Bush, which is to say, recognizing Clinton.

These charts -- good ones -- from the St. Petersburg Times show that Clinton inherited a $5 trillion dollars in debt from George H. W. Bush, and that's true.  But in his second term, he managed to balance the federal budget.  What happens when you don't spend more than you have?  You can start to pay of the princple, that's what.  Eventually, you'll get your debt down to zero.  That's a balanced national budget for you, courtesy a Democrat.

I'm not going to spend time picking on George W. Bush (so tempting).  But look back at the chart.  The debt -- what the country owed -- went from six or seven trillion to about ten trillion when Obama took office in '08, nearly double.  That's what two wars and tax cuts for the wealthy will give you (look at the line for federal receipts -- that's taxes, and you'll see it goes down).

Not for nothing, but I don't recall hearing the volume about the national debt when Bush was in office quite as loudly (or at all) as I do now that a Democrat is in office.

But here we are.  So what to do? 

Hey, you tell me.  Or better yet, tell the New York Times: Budget Puzzle.  Thank you, New York Times!  This is too much fun.

Go ahead and give it a try.  How'd you do?  I ended up filling the gap 75% by raising taxes, and 25% with cuts, but I'm a pinko liberal freakshow.  (The truth is, I didn't even do a bank tax, so it could've been worse.) 

Give it a shot.  See if you can get the debt to zero.  It requires hard choices whether you're a liberal or conservative. 

Maybe Obama should try this with the deficit commission sitting around the computer.  And then maybe he should make a phone call to a guy who has some experience on this front.  I'm sure he's got the number.

You may also want to check out Howard Troxler's very "everyman" column on the issue here.

Here are what our Tampa Bay area friends and neighbors have to say about it.

Here's the PolitiFact review of the deficit commission's report (and by the way, I am aware that former Clinton chief of staff Erskine Bowles was a co-chairman of the commissioner -- maybe he should have called his old boss, too).

Special Comment: A Quick Word on the Suspension of Keith Olbermann

Update:  This, which you darn well better watch:

# # # #

I first heard the story that Politico broke about the suspension of MSNBC "Countdown" host Keith Olbermann kind of in passing (I did mention it in my earlier post).  I had heard that the cable network suspended him because he made political donations to candidates for office, and that employees of MSNBC weren't supposed to do that.  You see, there is a grave imperative in keeping separate our necessarily apolitical sources of critical news reporting and the political realm of campai...

Ha ha ha!  Whew!  Even I can't finish that one with a straight face.  For reasons I believe to be depressingly ovbious.

Anyway, I thought to myself, that can't possibly be the whole story, right? 

I mean, I figured there had to be much more to it, some huge piece I was missing.  Something critical that was so beyond the pale that the network executives simply had no choice but to suspend the host of their leading show indefinitely without pay.  Something so egregious that his immediate dismissal until further notice was warranted, post haste.

You know, something horrible, disturbing, and awful.  Like, say, I don't know...  how about fucking an employee, killing her in his office, and leaving her body there to rot.

I actually walked around with that in my head for a little bit today.  I thought that awful thing, and then I kind of realized it wasn't really fair.

I mean, here I was, judging what Keith Olbermann did -- which was break an agreement he had with the network -- and comparing it to something totally awful and unrelated that another MSNBC host was accused of, apparently without basis.  Comparing the Keith Olbermann suspension to the Joe Scarborough dead-employee-in-the-office thing was totally unfair to Joe Scarborough. 

I mean, it's not like Joe -- or even that idiot Pat Buchanan -- did the same thing as Keith and got away with it.

Oops.

Look, in seriousness, this one is going to hurt MSNBC.  I don't even have MSNBC anymore in my cable line-up, haven't watched "Countdown" (except for online clips) in a long while, now.  But I know Keith's still a liberal/progressive icon, and the management at MSNBC has really stepped in it.  It's not going to be tough from the perspective of "Keith is a friend to liberals" -- it's going to be tough because they allowed a double-standard.  Joe Scarborough is as conservative as the day is long, and the honcho at MSNBC who I guess thought he could get away with this, Phil Griffin, apparently is, too.  Now conservatives can donate to their candidates, but liberals can't?  That's not going to hold water.  At all. 

Anyway, if you dislike a double-standard as much as I do, here's your Friday night call to action: sign the petition and get Olbermann back on the air.  And then get a bunch of your friends to sign it. 

Our national media is undergoing profound change, and it's not all for the best, I'm sorry to say.  But if we all keep vigilant, we might be able to help steer it in at least a less bad direction.  For all our sake, for the sake of our precious republic, we have no choice but to try. 

And with that, I wish you good night... and good luck.

Policy Passes the Crossroads: The Divergence Between Liberals and Conservatives Growns

Two editorial pieces in yesterday's New York Times got me thinking about the state of the policy differences between liberals and conservatives, the impact those differences are having on America, and how it may play out in the election of 2012. 

That's right, I've pretty much written off 2010.  Talking about policy and strategy now is like going back to re-work the line-up or the roster at the bottom of the ninth.  It's going back to the chalk-board to design a whole new play with just seconds on the clock.  It's trying to come up with a lame sports analogy on a heavy blog entry when your daughter is about to wake up from a nap.

First, check out the piece from Bob Herbert: Policy at Its Worst.  He's lamenting the failure of leaders -- mostly the Governor Christie of New Jersey -- to build an underground tunnel connecting Jersey to New York. 

We can go to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and threaten to blow Iran off the face of the planet. We can conduct a nonstop campaign of drone and helicopter attacks in Pakistan and run a network of secret prisons around the world. We are the mightiest nation mankind has ever seen.

But we can’t seem to build a railroad tunnel to carry commuters between New Jersey and New York.

The United States is not just losing its capacity to do great things. It’s losing its soul. It’s speeding down an increasingly rubble-strewn path to a region where being second rate is good enough.  

He's right, of course. 

I have long lamented the opportunity lost in the oil spill, for example, small(ish) though it may be.  It was more than just a chance to hire cleanup crews, to engaged workers (though there are obviously some).  The same thing has held true for America's sorry, crumbling infrastructure.  This is all more than just a chance to hire people to go to work, as important, as desperately needed as that is.  It is, or it was, a chance to reinspire America. 

Mr. Herbert continues.  You can feel his frustration:

This is a railroad tunnel we’re talking about. We’re not trying to go to the Moon. This is not the Manhattan Project. It’s a railroad tunnel that’s needed to take people back and forth to work and to ease the pressure on the existing tunnel, a wilting two-track facility that’s about 100 years old. What is the matter with us?

The Chinese could build it. The Turks could build it. We can’t build it.

[snip]

We can’t put the population to work, or get the kids through college, or raise the living standards of the middle class and the poor. We can’t rebuild the infrastructure or curb our destructive overreliance on fossil fuels.

There have been many times when the U.S. has stunned the world with the breadth and greatness of its achievements — the Marshall Plan, the G.I. Bill, the world’s highest standard of living, the world’s finest higher education system, the space program, and on and on.

Somewhere, somehow, things went haywire. The nation that built the Erie Canal and Hoover Dam and the transcontinental railroad can’t even build a tunnel beneath the Hudson River from New Jersey to New York.

I guess infrastructure projects just aren't sexy.  

Anyway, this is all about whether or not Republicans (like Governor Christie) think building a tunnel which essentially makes almost everything better, literally, is a good idea or not.

Speaking of the other side, we have this from Jack Goldsmith, who worked in the Justice Department under George W. Bush.  His piece is about how we detain and ultimately what we do with terrorists we capture:

The Obama administration wants to show that federal courts can handle trials of Guantánamo Bay detainees, and had therefore placed high hopes in the prosecution of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, accused in the 1998 bombings of American embassies in East Africa. On Wednesday a federal judge, Lewis Kaplan of the United States District Court in Manhattan, made the government’s case much harder when he excluded the testimony of the government’s central witness because the government learned about the witness through interrogating Mr. Ghailani at a secret overseas prison run by the C.I.A.

Some, mostly liberals and civil libertarians, applauded the ruling, saying it showed that the rule of law is being restored. But many conservatives denounced it as proof that high-level terrorists cannot reliably be prosecuted in civilian courts and should instead be tried by military commissions.

The real lesson of the ruling, however, is that prosecution in either criminal court or a tribunal is the wrong approach. The administration should instead embrace what has been the main mechanism for terrorist incapacitation since 9/11: military detention without charge or trial.

I bolded that last bit.  Again -- this is in the New York Times, everybody, not the Onion.  This is one of the finest legal minds in the conservative spectrum, and kind of a big deal.  He teaches at Harvard Law.

And he is advocating simply capturing people and locking them up forever without a trial or even a charge.

You know, I hear a lot from a few friends and colleagues that, doggone it, they just can't tell the difference between those Democrats and the Republicans. 

Really?  Really?

Really?

Because whatever this Jack Goldsmith guy says, I'm against it.  Strongly.  And I hereby officially double-down on whatever Bob Herbert suggests.  This framework has been presented to us for the elections of 2010.  And people are going to kind of go the Jack Goldsmith route. 

The question of why is for after Election Day, for the post-mortems, for the Monday morning quarterbacking.

The question of how we make this picture even clearer, even more distinct, may answer itself before 2012. 

Despite what a lot of his progressive critics say, Obama has governed mostly from the "Bob Herbert" side.  With respect to how he's communicated with the base, it's mostly been, um, "Jack Goldsmith" (and some might argue a little more Jack Bauer).  I don't know what's on the agenda for the executive branch for the next two years.  There's certainly no guessing what the next tragic Deepwater Horizon scenario might be (ie, the unknown mess that will land on the president's desk). 

Whatever it is, if it is as divergent from the apparent Republican stance as you can imagine, 2012 may be a much better year than 2010.

They Go Hand in Hand: Books & Politics

I'm lucky enough to come from a family that really loves books.  I grew up reading all kinds of stuff -- Stephen King, Carl Hiaasen, Dave Barry, comic books, violent pulp novels, those crazy choose-your-own ending books.  And I loved -- and still love -- literature, too.  I have always liked Ernest Hemingway.  Remember reading Steinbeck in high school, and it stuck with me.  P.C. Wren wrote one of my all-time favorites, Beau Geste.  Ralph Ellison.  Conrad. 

I love reading Edgar Allan Poe around Halloween. 

Maya Angelou.  D.H. Lawrence.  Langston Hughes. 

Orwell. 

Melville.  Woolf.

Oh, yeah.  Shakespeare.

It wasn't really until I got to Washington, D.C. that I started reading a lot of non-fiction.  Still love it, though I mix it up pretty well with fiction.  For variety. 

Right now I'm in the middle of The Omnivore's Delimma, by Michael Pollan.  At this point in the book, I am fairly confident I am never buying food again.  If I thought I had the room or the talent, I'd grow everything from now on.  Seriously, read the book -- it's quite something.

But back to the political stuff: I came across this great set of book club recommendations.  Actually, Flashlight Worthy Books is a great site generally (and you can follow them on Twitter @flwbooks). 

Take some time and check out the Politics & Current Affairs section.  I was depressed at how many of the books I hadn't read... and then I remembered: I love books.  My Christmas wish list is already set! 

Look, any list (Must-Reads From the Panelists of Flaming Politics) that includes Richard Scarry's Busy, Busy World A.) knows a lot about politics, and B.) is my kind of book list.

But FLW Books is not relegated to the political, of course.  There is a book list for Biography & Memoir, one category of which is Memoirs of Our Presidential Candidates.

It's a long story and you don't care, but I've pretty much had to give up drinking.  But for my friends who like to hit the sauce, there's Nine Booze-Soaked Books (of which I have read a dismal four: Big Sur; Tortilla Flat; Tender is the Night; John Barleycorn).  Anyone who has spent five seconds in politics knows that drinking and politicking go together like reading and... well... writing, I guess.  Something like that, anyway.    

I spend a lot of time on this blog smarmily congratulating myself on my time in the Clinton Administration and other political adventures.  But one thing I don't talk about -- ever -- is my writing life, such as it is.  Or such as I want it to be. 

I have finished a novel-length work (even I don't have the chutzpah to call it a "book") of fiction that is essentially a love story set against the backdrop of a war in the violent criminal underworld.  I'm looking for an agent.  I have begun re-writing a second work of similar length.  I've had small pieces of fiction and non-fiction published in some relatively small journals. 

I enjoy writing.  I enjoy the process, and I am enjoying learning about how the agenting and publishing world works (there is a lot to learn). 

Anyway, I found the Writing list to be a treasure trove.  It's the other half of my Christmas list.

So if you belong to a book club -- whether or not it's political -- please check out these book club recommendations.  Thanks to Flashlight Worthy Books, I bet you'll find something you like.

Veepstakes and the Lowest Drawer

I read Jack Germond's "Fat Man in a Middle Seat" when it came out in, I think, 1999 or so.  I still consider it a must-read, and recommend it to anyone with even a passing interest in politics and news. 

One of the things about it is, it makes you want to reach for your best scotch glass and a bottle of the good stuff.  I don't really drink much scotch anymore (or really anything for that matter) so when I think about that book now I just salivate a lot and ask people if they smell peat. 

The reason for the Pavlovian response is because it's kind of a old-school tale of reporters who covered politics.  This was back when everyone in the news business drank.  A lot.  And they drank even more on the campaign trail.  It kind of romanticizes the whole business of covering politics and campaigns, all through the liquid-brownish hue of a scotch glass with a double pour.  It's funny: can you imagine sitting across from Obama, Rahm, and Gibbs on the campaign plane and pulling out a bottle of Black & White today?

Anyway, I just finished the case by Tunku Varadarajan of why Obama should shuffle of Joe Biden and make Secretary of State Hillary Clinton his running mate in 2012 over at the Daily Beast.  All I can reasonably conclude is that the tradition of drinking heavily in the newsroom is alive and well.

2012 is still two years away—a veritable lifetime in American, or any other, politics. But that shouldn’t stop us from talking, or even fantasizing, about the next presidential election. After all, what else is there to lick our lips over these days—Linda McMahon? Michaele Salahi? Mad Men?

Maybe a that fifth of gin you got stored in the lower desk drawer? 

It goes downhill from there.  In fact, Tunku is barely coherent, sloshing around from barely discernible point to head-scratching point. 

Obama first. Whatever his failings as a reformer and a president, and however much of a beating he takes in the midterms later this year, there is absolutely no way that this racially peerless president will not offer himself to the nation for a second term. And why should he not? Carter did. And Carter was but the first peanut farmer to be president.

So, the guy who reformed health care and gave us the most comprehensive Wall Street reforms since the 30s is a reform failure already, and will be seen as such in 2012. 

Well.  Maybe we can agree that's just a touch of a leap.  And to boldly predict that he will run again in 2010!  Way to risk it all, Tunku. 

And he should run again... because... wait for it... Jimmy Carter did.  I will bet anyone a bottle of Grey Goose vodka that he felt good about this sentence: "And Carter was but the first peanut farmer to be president."  Don't hold your breath for the Pulitzer folks, Tunku.

It gets better.  He decides to pick on Joe Biden, the Vice President, as though he were some feeble old man.

Biden: Dear old Biden. Let us not be naïve. Obama needed him. Obama, the first serious black candidate for the White House, needed someone reassuringly all-American to run with him. It was a question of political aesthetics. Biden, with his hard-Scranton childhood, was the perfect foil to Obama’s unprecedented blackness-on-the-brink-of-power. He continues to be so in ways big and small:

The editors at the Daily Beast must not be drinking, lest they'd have called it "Where the white women at!"

For the record, I do agree with him that Secretary Clinton has done a great job as Secretary of State.  I don't understand this recent fascination with the idea that because she's doing such a great job, she should get Biden's job.  It just doesn't work that way.

Tunku's thesis, as you'll see, is simple.  Apparently Obama needs to exile Joe Biden, who is obviously some sort of child molesting war criminal who long ago served some vague purpose we no longer care about, to that revolting hell-hole, Scranton, where he will spend his days guest-starring on the Steve Carrell-less The Office.  ("It's a big fucking deal!" could be his tag-line.)

This is a depressing piece.  He can't even get his arms around what he's trying to say in the closing.

In sum, 2012 is going to be a bruising, battling presidential election: Barack Obama is going to need Hillary more than he needs Biden. He’s going to need Hillary, also, because he needs Bill. The vice president’s job is Hillary’s for the asking—and, if the Republicans aren’t careful, the taking.

Wait, you just throw that in the second-to-last sentence.  He needs Hillary (and by the way, it's Secretary of State Clinton, you jackass), because he needs "Bill" (President Clinton; getting hammered really does knock down boundaries...).  Why wouldn't he have "Bill", anyway, Tunku?  Didn't even broach that thought, did you? 

If the Republican's aren't careful, Hillary will take the VP job?  Wait.  Is this drunk logic, or just poor writing?  Is he saying that Obama/Clinton is such a winning ticket, the GOP can't win?  Or...

Hell, I don't know.  I don't make just a ton of predictions here, and especially not about 2012.  I'm not even ready to make any solid predictions about 2010 yet.  I will say this: the 2012 ticket for Democrats will be Barack Obama and Joe Biden.  Such a bold gamble!  And would you believe I'm stone sober?

The Rich Stay Healthy, The Sick Stay Poor

I'm not an economist, but this bit from former Treasury Secretaries Paul O'Neill (of the W. Administration) and Robert Rubin (of the Clinton Administration) seems to be pretty awful: more stimulus isn't the answer, they say.

Rubin, who served under Democratic President Bill Clinton, said the U.S. is “going to have slow and bumpy growth,” during a taped interview on CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS” aired today. A “major second stimulus” might create more uncertainty and undermine confidence, he said.

Wait, how might that "create more uncertainty"?  How might it "undermine confidence"?  Who would be uncertain?  Whose confidence undermined? 

You know the answer, right?  The answer is: rich people like him.  Both Rubin and O'Neill tip their hand in the next paragraph: 

Companies concerned about demand won’t expand facilities or hire new employees until sales have improved, said O’Neill, who was Treasury secretary under Republican President George W. Bush. “We are moving forward at a pretty gradual pace,” he said. “But I don’t think things are terrible.”

Well, Paul.  First of all, like I said before, I ain't no economist, but don't you think folks ought to have a little money before they can friggin' spend it?  Hey, you're the economic genius, the guy at the top of his game, the former Treasury Secretary, former CEO.  You show me how that works: a guy who is unemployed, who is not getting a paycheck, who has no money in his bank account, you show me how that guy "improves sales" by spending money he does not have.

"But I don’t think things are terrible."  Robert Rubin, you are a terrible person.  No, I don't guess for a guy that's worth many, many tens of millions of dollars "things are terrible."

No, instead of offering a construct for a practical solution which would, you know, help people, O'Neill and Rubin offer a construct for a practical solution to help, you know, themselves.  Tax reform.  Which is a sort of code for "I pay the lowest percentage tax rate in the history of this country, so don't let my tax cuts expire."

The recovery is working, but it is slow.  On that much I can agree with the former Secretaries.  According to Recovery.gov, Florida, for example, has added around 40,000 jobs.  It's good, but it's not enough.

At the non-partisan Economic Policy Institute, they are advocating for income and job boosters.  You know, to give people money O'Neill so desperately wants them to spend.  And we need to do it now:

By the last quarter of 2010, the Recovery Act will no longer provide a boost to growth. What will emerge to take up the slack of fading Recovery Act spending is a troubling open question about the economy going forward. It would be wise for policymakers to provide more fiscal support to the economy, and soon.

What's that?  Sixteen states have double-digit unemployment? 

Well, can't you see?  That's it!  All those unemployed people now have more time to go shopping!  The economy should be rumbling along any time now!

Look, I realize that O'Neill and Rubin and really big-time, super-important people, and they're on big talk shows like GPS and Bloomberg is writing about what they say.  But I must point out that they're not making a lick of sense.  I'm not so sure the emperors have any clothes.  And it's kind of hard to watch.

Instead, while the economic indexes stay essentially flat-lined (which go hand-in-hand with the economic confidence numbers), Bob Rubin and Paul O'Neill will continue their public plea to save their own portfolios.