The reporter who solicits the views of the undecided voter in e-mail, or in person at hinterland rallies, never thinks they’re heevahavas. No, his or her undecided voters are always the most thoughtful of citizens.
In this manner, John Dickerson, a box of rocks looking for eyeballs at Slate, does his bit on the cliche, choosing to believe that someone who admires Mitt Romney because he is an “Etch-a-Sketch” is being more of a critical thinker than the rest of us.
This exercise was refreshing and faith restoring. That isn’t a knock against partisans. They care about the country enough to donate their time and energy to the cause. That makes them a necessary treasure to democracy. I spend a lot of time with partisans at rallies listening to their worries and hopes. But in the digital world, partisans are often full of certainties, snap judgments, and insults. The passion overwhelms illumination. These correspondents are undecided—or “still deciding,” as one put it in an effort to lessen the stigma—because they weigh the duty so heavily. More important, they all have a quality that has all but disappeared in this election: They pause long enough to hear the other side’s arguments. Not once in these emails did a voter write about one of the candidates’ supposed gaffes. They are the perfect combination: skeptical and thoughtful. They don’t trust politicians, the press, or pundits, but they treat the ideas of all of those players seriously enough to formulate an opinion of their own. If only the politicians trying to get their vote behaved the same way.
An academic brushes him off:
Political scientists tell us my respondents are not your typical undecided voters. In fact, according to Lynn Vavreck, a political scientist at UCLA, the undecided voters are the exact opposite of those who responded to my request. They are not that involved in politics, they’re not reading up on the issues—or any issue since they tend not to follow the news—they’re not sure that their vote will matter, or they’re sick of the whole business. “When I look at the data, what I see is that the majority of [undecided voters] have a hard time making sense of the political world,??? says Vavreck. “The normal cues—party, ideology—that early voters use are like a foreign language to them.???
Another argument can be made. When you invite e-mails from a name organization your are bound to get replies from people who would like to see their words in print. And, it being e-mail, not off-the-cuff and face to face, you will get a certain amount of faux sincerity, massaged and rewritten to sound good. Which, of course, you will be inclined to pick for a superficial quality of “thoughtfulness.”
In Sunday’s New York Times, a front page piece on how corporate America has shifted to staffing with part-time employees, to avoid benefits and the payment of wages:
While there have always been part time workers, especially in restaurants and retailers, employers today rely on them far more than before as they seek to cut costs and align staffing to customer traffic. The trend has frustrated millions of Americans … reducing their pay and benefits.
“We’re seeing more and more that the burden of market fluctuation is being shifted onto the workers, as opposed to the companies absorbing it themselves,” said Carrie Gleason, the executive director of the Retail Action Project, an advocate for retail workers …
Many retailers now use sophisticated software that track the flow of customers, allowing managers to assign just enough employees to handle anticipated demand … Many employers have schedule shifts as short as two or three hours … The widening use of part-time employees has been a bane to many workers, pushing many into poverty and forcing some onto food stamps and Medicaid. And with work schedules that change week to week, workers can find it hard to arrange child care, attend college or hold a second job …
Here is seen the maximizing of profit by compressing wages and having government programs in the tattered safety net picking up the slack. This from corporate America, where the prevailing sentiment during the last four years is that socialism and entitlement has run rampant.
However, the kind of entitlement spending that allows corporate American to pay people so poorly that there aren’t yet food riots is apparently OK.
The answer isn’t near at hand.
It will be generational as the current climate of corporate predation can’t be changed, only slowly replaced.
And the only way it can be supplanted is through the strengthening of labor after decades of attack from the private sector. And law requiring that people must be paid a living wage.
It is replete with working citizens who cannot earn a living, the wreckage of a technology-assisted all-against-all American system in which human lives exist to be boiled down, reduced and atomized for profit.
In its anecdotal account it is a vision starkly at odds with the views of the dangerous and crazy Republican Party, our country’s Ted Nugents, with their belief that 50 percent of the people are lazy moochers and blood-suckers.
[It] is impossible to look at Mr Romney’s proposals – reductions in marginal income tax rates offset by unspecified reductions in tax expenditures – without concluding that they “would provide large tax cuts to high-income households, and increase the tax burdens on middle- and lower-income taxpayers???. In an economy with surging inequality, this would make the underlying problem worse.
The issues go far beyond economics. Divides over social and foreign policies are self-evidently profound. But the economic choices are also important. Americans have a choice between a man with modest ambitions and someone determined to double up on the fiscal and financial policies of the pre-crisis era. Mr Romney, like the Bourbons, has learnt nothing and forgotten nothing.
For the Financial Times, it’s a pretty good kick in the ass.
If you access it, enlarge the graphical presentation for the plot of the “growth in real after tax income.” The top 1 percent dwarf everybody, even their shoeshine army.
Sunday was a fine day in Pasadena, warm but not incinerating like most of late summer. You could feel the fall coming on as the sun set, the heat from the afternoon leaving for the sky. And so the closest thing I still have to a family member and I took one last year’s opportunity to grill chicken in the driveway, something we hadn’t done much since the death of a close friend over a year ago.
And while enjoying the day we spent a lot of time talking about what had happened to the country. How had our demographic, the white American, become so rancid and bad? And we had no answers. How could anyone be so driven mad by hate as the current standard of the Republican Party?
In Pasadena, there are stark examples of what the last four years of austerity have wrought. California has been a smaller version, ahead of things in the rest of the country. Before the presidency of Barack Obama, it had a Republican minority that made governance impossible.
Because of the legislative rule that all law having to do with taxes and the budget requires a two-thirds majority, the unimportant party paralyzed California. It ruined the political career of one its own, the celebrity governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was torn to shreds on the horns of its extremism.
And in Pasadena, something I see every day, PCC — the city college, is now virtually undone. Sure, it still has students and the buildings are there. But because of austerity and the Great Recession, there isn’t the money to teach anyone. There’s no money to pay instructors, no money for anything. One of the jewels of the California city college network, long a way for the disadvantaged to at least get some manner of education that might help in the American labor force, sits idle. You can maybe take one course a semester.
“They come in, they’re admitted, but there are no classes. They want that basic English, basic math, all that, chemistry, history courses. And it’s full,” Scott said.
Last year the system as a whole turned away 137,000 students who could not get into a single course.
“It’s sad to think that we’re looking at a group of students who are thirsty for higher education, all of which would enrich their life and enrich the economy of California, and because of a lack of state resources, we’re having to limit it,” Scott said.
Gen said those numbers don’t even include the number of students who may get one or two courses but will take much longer to reach their goals.
He said this is especially problematic when the community colleges are often relied upon for retraining and updating skills during an economic downturn.
“It’s not happening because we’re not willing, and not because there are too few students, but because we’re not able to get funding,” Gen said.
The Republican Party, which can’t get officials elected anywhere in the state that isn’t lily white in the hinterlands or near San Diego, have brought on the destruction of everything.
And this is what Mitt Romney will deliver to the rest of the nation of he inexplicably wins in the first week of November.
The party of nihilism and know-nothing will take over, people who believe in naught but maximizing theirs and squeezing and persecuting everyone else unlike them.
A party that disbelieves science.
A demographic in which reason and truth mean nothing.
And it’s frightening.
Because so many have bought into its toxic philosophies, repellent beliefs that 50 percent of the citizenry are parasites, that the Federal Reserve needs to be destroyed, that gays, women and non-white immigrants must be hounded. The astonishing burning animosity toward everyone not the same color. There is no bottom to the vat of poison it has tapped into.
[If] these people triumph, science — or any kind of scholarship — will become impossible. Everything must pass a political test; if it isn’t what the right wants to hear, the messenger is subjected to a smear campaign.
[It’s] their general hostility to anything that helps the 47 percent — those Americans whom they consider moochers who need to be taught self-reliance.
Before the weekend, the Associated Press ran another of those stories on the Heevahave Vote — the so-called “undecided voter,” and it’s lead subject, a white middle-aged man named Kelly Cox, was from California.
Who are these people who still can’t make up their minds? They’re undecided voters like Kelly Cox, who spends his days repairing the big rigs that haul central California’s walnuts, grapes, milk and more across America.
He doesn’t put much faith in either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney. But he figures he’s got plenty of time – a little more than a week – to settle on one of them before Nov. 6. And he definitely does plan to vote.
“I’ll do some online research,” said Cox, co-owner of a Delhi, Calif., truck-repair shop. “I don’t have time to watch presidential debates because it’s a lot of garbage anyway. They’re not asking the questions that the people want to hear.”
On-line research. It’s to laugh, tossed-off horseshit.
First, the debate made [these undecided voters] want to do more research on the candidates. “I need to research some of these facts,??? one skeptical sounding woman said.
And they’ll research us into total failure, given their way.
Cox, said to be from Delhi, is from the other part of California, the great dusty wasteland, in this case somewhere between Modesto and Merced, that votes Republican but will have no impact due to the electoral college. (Don’t believe me? May you be stuck there some summer, driving the highway north and south.)
In this itself, the AP story was a joke. It’s banner undecided voter was someone whose vote is irrelevant next week.
Stay home, skip the on-line research, Mr. Kelly Cox.
Nationally, the state is going for Obama. His vote won’t matter at the national level. Neither candidate has bothered to campaign in the nation’s largest state.
However, at the local level it has been quite another thing. Because it’s the small extremist white minority in California that has managed to strangle the place, a lesson for the rest of the country.
Other pro-growth reforms would increase government tax revenues needed for these programs by stimulating the economy. One would be to adopt, yes, a flat tax. It would go a long way in achieving the prosperity that Mr. Obama never achieved with his monstrous spending. A flat tax would reduce taxes for many people …
Returning to a gold standard is another much-overlooked reform. Most people today, including most politicians, fail to appreciate how our current system of fluctuating currency values is a drag on the economy.
President Obama enters the final days of the campaign with a substantial lead among women — about 11 points, according to the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll — and enormous leads among Latinos and African Americans, the nation’s two largest minority groups. Mitt Romney leads among white voters, with an incredible 2-to-1 advantage among white men.
It is too simplistic to conclude that demography equals destiny. Both men are being sincere when they vow to serve the interests of all Americans. But it would be disingenuous to pretend not to notice the obvious cleavage between those who have long held power in this society and those who are beginning to attain it.
When Republicans vow to “take back our country,??? they never say from whom. But we can guess.
From Barbara Tuchman’s The March of Folly (1984), which had quite a lot to say about American failure in Vietnam, but which closes with something more universal:
While such virtues as [character] may in truth be in everyone’s power, they have less chance in our system than money and ruthless ambition to prevail at the ballot box. The problem may be not so much a matter of educating officials for government or educating the electorate to recognize and reward integrity … and to reject the ersatz. Perhaps better men flourish in better times, and wiser government requires the nourishment of a dynamic rather than a troubled and bewildered society.
The Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy — this time from the side of our arms manufacturers — finally think they have an electronic bomb.
And they’ve bragged about making and changing history in a p.r. video with only, ahem, one thousand some views as of yesterday.
Boeing can’t show you the Counter-electronics High-powered Advanced Missile Project, or CHAMP, in their dog and pony show video with the Air Force Research Laboratory. But they can show you old computers blinking in a narrow view (‘the monitors shown in the video at Boeing’s announcement of the tests only shut down for a few seconds’ reads one piece of Plaster Caster press).
And lottsa animated footage of an animated missile flying over a city.
So the astute viewer, not a stenographer journalist unfamiliar with the long history of these things, will be prepared to ask questions like:
What’s the range when the target PC is interrupted for a few seconds?
What’s the size of the weapon?
What tactical advantage is gained by making the lights and PC monitors in select buildings blink while an unopposed missile is flying overhead?
If it is envisioned as “invaluable against enemy infrastructure like radar and missile launch sites” how is it superior to an ordinary anti-radiation homing or direct attack weapon with longer range?
And if it as short range as exhibited how can it be used as effectively in air defense suppression?
Questions, questions! Why must you ask so many questions? Can you not see, Dick, how Air Force, Boeing and Raytheon boffins have shaken the pillars of science with their work in secret military labs? Surely this will get them to a Nobel ceremony.
Tell it to the Plaster Caster tech press and the guy at Aviation Week. He’s been telling everybody the electronic rays are here for years.
Anyway, that’s where all the easily overawed ass-kissers of military electrical engineers are.
When you make the world a better place rather than make something for trivially annoying people who can’t effectively fight back to charge off on the taxpayer, send me an e-mail.
Invariably, what now happens is that something will be sold to the military that’s an expensive dud, or nearly so. Like the Sheriff, aka the infamous pain ray, brought to you by many of the very same people.
Savor that “made history and stands to change the world” bullshit in the CHAMP commercial. Then look at what some really famous Nobel laureates did once here.
Whoever wins the upcoming presidential election, by halfway through the new term the Commander-in-Chief could be wielding a new weapon straight out of science fiction: laser cannons …
Earlier this year [Rear Adm. Matthew Klunder’s] office had said the Navy was four years away from mounting the laser weapons, but [Monday he said] that recent tests had been “very successful” and the Navy has figured out physics issues that plagued early concepts.
“We’re well past physics,” he said. “We’re just going through the integration efforts… Hopefully that tells you we’re well mature, and we’re ready to put these on naval ships.”
Well past the physics. One of the hallmarks of bad science: Extraordinary claims not backed up by any particularly compelling evidence other than publicity statement.
File under Military Tech Plaster Casters and stenography.
Good news and bad news, lads. Laser cannons allegedly
almost here, but denial of science of global warming. Does this
country have its shit wired, or what?!
Frontline’s special on how a few groups in the far right Republican Party made the fact of global warming a no-go in the United States is here.
This has made the country into a redoubt of know-nothing-ism and anti-science.
“They think of themselves as rebels,” Frontline’s John Hockenberry says at the start.
Rebels — a bunch of overweight white men with no scientific credentials and a few run-out-of-town ex-scientist pariahs in the Republican Party. But how they know how to work closed media.
Scientists go on to explain how these groups — specifically entities like the Heartland and Cato Institute’s purposely misread the data and harass those publishing on the science with FOIA requests for their e-mail in fishing expeditions in hopes that handfuls of messages, presented out of context, can be used to damage reputations.
From yesterday, William L. Shirer — in 1959 — on the results of totalitarians:
It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or read in the newspapers. Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but on such occasions one was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a shock of silence, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one realized how useless it was to try to even make contact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the facts of life had become what Hitler and Goebbels, with their cynical disregard for truth, said they were.
Make no mistake, a great deal of responsibility lies with the supine Democratic Party, too. John Kerry explains it vacated the issue because of attacks from the right.
Bob Inglis, a Republican who was primaried out of office from the right, believed human causation of climate change. And he relates how he was taken down by Tea Party attacks and talk radio, lumped in with the scientists assumed to be “godless liberals.”
“Tennessee passed a law to allowing the views of climate change skeptics to be taught in schools,” informs Frontline.
For half the country, science has been turned into a dungeon by the Republican Party.
“The [Heartland Institute’s climate change denial] campaign of alternative scientific studies, opinion pieces, books, and charts has been been building for years,” informs Frontline. It was bankrolled by big oil.
“Advocacy groups were enlisted to confuse the issue,” it continues.
“Exxon’s millions for skeptic’s groups made it a public target which would eventually be a problem for a publicly-traded company,” says Hockenberry.
“New leadership” at Exxon decided to review its anti-science strategy in 2006. Funding for its anti-science initiatives was suspended.
However, the damage had been done. Other deep pockets, like the Koch brothers, have stepped in to continue the financing of global warming denial. Even more money has been funneled through anonymous funding in the guise of a black hole agency located in Alexandria, Virginia, called Donors Trust.
“The [climate] scientists pushing this have a Marxist agenda,” says one of the climate denial quacks, a man funded by unknown business tycoons, right at the end.
Filming usually takes place in the relative’s house. (Henry’s owner donates her cat’s time to Braden.) It is short but challenging. Henry tends to call it a day after about 20 minutes. Braden tries to bother the cat as little as possible, often shooting with a long lens, as a wild animal photographer would do. Occasionally he reverses a shot so it looks as if Henry is turning toward the camera when he is actually turning away.
“That is what $40,000 of film school will get you,” he says.
It takes Braden less than two weeks to make an Henrí video. He films for three days, then spends about a week editing the footage and adding sound. He writes about half the video, about one minute of content, before he starts shooting. He wants to leave room for inspiration.
I’m a fan and not just because I have a tuxedo cat.
