Tag: politics (Page 3 of 6)

Turkey Day Tradition

November 26, 2014 / DB

This is better suited for a Friday Links post, but since I just saw it today and it’s relevant to tomorrow’s holiday, I thought I would go ahead and share it today.

I think I had heard of this before, but never read the details. In 1939, President Roosevelt decided to change the date of Thanksgiving to add another week of Christmas shopping. The hope was that extra week would give a boost to the struggling economy.

His decision did not go over well.

Republicans pounced, and used the move to portray Roosevelt as a power-mad tyrant. In an early example of Godwin’s Law, FDR’s recent presidential opponent Alf Landon said Roosevelt sprung his decision on “an unprepared country with the omnipotence of a Hitler.” Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire suggested that while Roosevelt was at it, he should abolish winter.

As you will read, for three years Thanksgiving was held on different days in different states until a new, permanent date was established that we still use today.

Politics, man.

But we do have a precedent for my brilliant idea of a year or two ago: moving Christmas to late January. Come on, Obama, do it!

The executive action that tore a nation apart

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

When Logic Gets Cast Aside

April 21, 2014 / DB

Most of us have thought, at some point, that we could sway someone with different political views to our side if we just presented them with cold, hard facts showing that our view was correct.

Turns out even when the numbers support your argument, you are unlikely to change the opinion of someone from the other side.

Presented with this problem a funny thing happened: how good subjects were at math stopped predicting how well they did on the test. Now it was ideology that drove the answers. Liberals were extremely good at solving the problem when doing so proved that gun-control legislation reduced crime. But when presented with the version of the problem that suggested gun control had failed, their math skills stopped mattering. They tended to get the problem wrong no matter how good they were at math. Conservatives exhibited the same pattern — just in reverse.
Being better at math didn’t just fail to help partisans converge on the right answer. It actually drove them further apart.

How Politics Makes Us Stupid

This is a really interesting article, and I recommend reading it even if you don’t give a damn about politics. For those who are into politics, it is even more illuminating. It goes to show how so many folks in Washington, elected or otherwise, can go to the “They’re just making the numbers up” argument and get so many people to believe them. As always, math is hard. And when it challenges our core beliefs it’s easier to believe the fuzzy math than it is to accept the real numbers and adjust our world view.

I found this tidbit about Congress interesting as well.

In the mid-20th century, the two major political parties were ideologically diverse. Democrats in the South were often more conservative than Republicans in the North. The strange jumble in political coalitions made disagreement easier. The other party wasn’t so threatening because it included lots of people you agreed with. Today, however, the parties have sorted by ideology, and now neither the House nor the Senate has any Democrats who are more conservative than any Republicans, or vice versa. This sorting has made the tribal pull of the two parties much more powerful because the other party now exists as a clear enemy.

On Waco And Different Beliefs

March 27, 2014 / DB

Trying to get caught up on some links I need to share before we take a mini-vacation early next week.

Malcolm Gladwell has a piece in the New Yorker about Clive Doyle, a survivor of the Waco, TX Branch Dividian compound, and the lessons that are still emerging, 20 years later, from that disaster.

It’s a really interesting read. What stuck with me most was how the Federal agents, and really all the law enforcement agencies involved in the action, utterly failed to understand the people inside the compound. It’s hard to blame them, though. As I recall, public opinion was pretty firmly on the Feds’ side. David Koresh and his followers were widely assumed to be religious wackos who were likely involved in all kinds of irreligious, and immoral, behaviors. There was no push from the broader public to be more accommodating to Koresh.

I found this section to be especially profound. I think many of us, whether we consider ourselves to be open-minded or not, tend to dismiss people we view as not just outside the mainstream, but dramatically so.

Mainstream American society finds it easiest to be tolerant when the outsider chooses to minimize the differences that separate him from the majority. The country club opens its doors to Jews. The university welcomes African-Americans. Heterosexuals extend the privilege of marriage to the gay community. Whenever these liberal feats are accomplished, we congratulate ourselves. But it is not exactly a major moral accomplishment for Waspy golfers to accept Jews who have decided that they, too, wish to play golf. It is a much harder form of tolerance to accept an outsider group that chooses to maximize its differences from the broader culture. And the lesson of Clive Doyle’s memoir—and the battle of Mount Carmel—is that Americans aren’t very good at respecting the freedom of others to be so obnoxiously different.

I’m reminded of the old saying that everyone is for free speech, until someone else’s speech annoys or pisses them off. We’re all for freedom of expression for ourselves and people we’re comfortable with. But when someone else expresses them self in a way we can’t understand or that disturbs our sensibilities, suddenly we want to slam on the brakes.

Obviously the commentary on the Waco disaster is forever tinged by the political aims of those making the assessments. But this piece is a good reminder that there’s often more to a situation than the public is allowed to know. And if we claim to be considerate of the views of others, we can’t summarily dismiss groups that we find strange.

That said, the whole multi-wives, some quite young, is outside the bounds of acceptable behavior. Still, those poor people never deserved their fates because the rest of us found them to be weird.

Sacred And Profane

11/6/12

November 8, 2012 / DB

Despite my moratorium on political postings, it is a bit of a tradition for me to wrap up the general election. So here are some observations, thoughts, musings, and what-have-yous.

In 2004 I watched the results in our basement, scribbling down thoughts in a notebook and occasionally running upstairs to check things on the computer or send IMs to friend of the blog Dale S. as we tried to figure out how the hell the numbers weren’t breaking our way. Over the next several days I wrote thousands of words that both put my political science degree to use and served as catharsis after that crushing loss. If memory serves, I published two of my three epic pieces but was too exhausted to post the final entry.

In 2008 I watched from our living room, sending emails from my laptop while constantly wiping my nose as I fought a vicious cold. I recall the joy of the west coast states coming in and, shortly after, Ohio getting called and what had seemed likely for several weeks finally coming true. I also remember getting out of bed at 4:00 AM to give then month-old L. a bottle, checking my phone, and being amazed at Indiana dropping into the blue column for the first time in over a generation. For the first time in my life, my presidential vote counted.

This year I returned to the basement, which I realized was tempting fate as the fundamentals of the race seemed awfully similar to 2004. But that’s where the good TV is now, plus it’s warmer there and closer to the beer and scotch. No running list of thoughts in a notebook or on the iPad this time. I mostly watched MSNBC, occasionally switching over to NBC and Fox. I texted constantly with John N. And I had Safari tabs open to Daily Kos and Andrew Sullivan to see numbers not being reported on air. And I toughed it out until 2:30 to catch the two big speeches of the night.

Things That Pleased Me:

Obviously Obama being reelected. His first term was far from perfect. But when you look at the economic/fiscal mess he inherited, I think he deserves a second term just for the chance to sink or swim on his own. I think that was what really turned the election. Not the auto bailout or Mitt’s difficulty connecting with the masses or Sandy. While I don’t think the core of people who decided the election necessarily blame the Great Recession on George Bush, I do think they realize that it wasn’t Obama’s creation and he warrants a chance to govern without the weight of it on his back.
Richard Mourdock going down in defeat. I think Joe Donnelly was a fine candidate, and will be a fine senator for the great state of Indiana. In fact, he is much more likely to carve out a role similar to Richard Lugar than Mourdock ever was. And he seemed to be slightly ahead in most polls before Mourdock offered his views on rape/misspeak horribly on rape.¹ But Mourdock was a jackass before those comments and needed to lose. I’m not confident there’s going to be much cooperation between parties in the Senate, but having one fewer person who stated his goal was to obstruct continuously gives me a glimmer of hope. Mourdock was no Dick Lugar but he certainly was a dick.
The end of the culture wars as wedge issues. There will always be wedge issues; ways of frightening the base to get out and vote in large numbers. But over the last eight years, the tide has turned on many of the core issues the GOP has been pushing since 1980. Various gay rights issues in swing states were credited with helping George W. Bush win in 2004, as the evangelical Christian vote turned out in droves to make sure those measures were defeated, and pushed him past John Kerry in the process. Each year since then, gay rights have advanced. The pro-gay rights side won all four ballot initiatives Tuesday. Abortion rights are now an area for defense rather than offense for Republicans. I think these issues are going to fade away and the parties will have to find new ways to scare their bases.
The many jokes relating to Colorado passing personal possession and use of marijuana. Lots of people tweeted either their belief that CU will soon have great teams in every sport or their understanding of why Peyton Manning signed up to give away two million pizzas. Humor unites us!
Steve Schmidt, former McCain strategist who served as the lone Republican on the MSNBC set, a tough seat to fill. He’s definitely an MSNBC Republican, meaning he’s far from an ideologue and socially moderate. But he served as a good counter to the rest of the panel and offered a good look at what was going on inside each campaign on Election Night.
Rachel Maddow. She’s just the best.

Things That Annoyed Me:

Fucking Florida. Are you kidding me? Twelve years to fix your voting system and it’s still a total disaster. Forget about the whole voter suppression angle, I wonder if politicians don’t want to fix these messes because it will always give them an out to claim the election was somehow stolen from them if they lose. I probably offer a list like this every four years, but there are a few easy fixes for our electoral woes:

1 – Federal elections should be run by the Federal government. A common ballot and voting system across all 50 states. If the states want to fuck up their own races, let them. But if you’re going to vote for president, a US Senator, or US Representative, it should be a level playing field for every voter.
2 – As a sub-point to that, either make Election Day a Federal holiday where everyone gets off work, move it to a Saturday, or expand and standardize early voting options. It should not be hard to vote. Waiting an hour or two to vote is reasonable, especially if you don’t have to worry about getting back to your job. But it should not take eight hours to cast your ballot in the most technologically advanced time in human history.
3 – Give people options on where to vote. Here in Indiana you can check the BMV’s website and see how long the wait is at various branches and can pick the site where you want to renew your plates or whatever. Do the same with voting. Allow people to check wait times and then pick from one of several places to vote.
4 – And stop screwing people in poor and minority neighborhoods. Give them equal access to voting places and voting booths within those places. As the President said last night, we have to fix this.
– The Republican war on facts. I don’t live in a bubble. I have lots of Republican friends. And the overwhelming majority of them are completely reasonable folks who are reminiscent of what the Republican Party was 20 or 30 years ago: social moderates, or even liberals, who favor laissez-faire economic policies. We might disagree on how to do things, but these are generally people I can talk to. And I hope they feel like they can talk to me.

But increasingly some of the loudest voices in the party, and thus more and more of the rank and file, have decided to treat everything that displeases them as false, fabricated, and dismiss it out of hand. I don’t think any of my friends fall into this category, thankfully.

Overwhelming evidence of climate change? It’s not real, it’s made up, it’s all part of some grand conspiracy to hold America back. The polls don’t reflect how you think the race should go? Again, they’re made up, they’re biased, and we’ll massage them until they say what we want and treat those as fact. A non-partisan congressional office that has been trusted by both parties for generations releases a set of statistics that don’t fit your narrative for the election? Denounce it, force it to be recalled, and then act like it never happened.

Rachel Maddow had a terrific rant about this late in the night in which she suggested this attitude isn’t just bad for the party going forward, it’s dangerous to our democracy. It’s one thing to battle in Florida in 2000 to make sure the votes are counted correctly. It’s another to say numbers that are scientifically proven and based on reviewable evidence are certainly wrong and likely created out of thin air. Sticking your head in the sand is not a winning political strategy. And it holds us back as a nation when one of our two political parties continues to do it. This is 2012. It’s an odd time to be denouncing science.
– The rush to lay out the next X years in politics based on one campaign. This always bugs me. Sure, you can infer some things from an election by looking at demographics, etc. But the fact is we have no idea what will be important in two years, in four years, or beyond that. Islamic terrorism certainly wasn’t on the tips of our tongues in 2000. In 1964 it looked like the Republicans were toast for the foreseeable future. All it takes is one catastrophic, or heroic, event. A once-in-a-lifetime candidate who trumps every issue we expected to be important.² Or a confluence of seemingly innocent events that change the political tide.

While there are some important signals that would lead a rational person to infer the Democrats appear to have the advantage going forward, Obama is now on the hook for the economy. If he fucks it up, all those demographic trends won’t mean a thing.
– Too many cooks in the kitchen. MSNBC really didn’t need six people at the main desk, especially when they were constantly throwing it to others in the studio or at the campaigns’ headquarters. Al Sharpton had a couple good cracks, but he lost his fastball a few years ago. Ed Shultz was a waste of space. I like Lawrence O’Donnell, but he didn’t have much space to offer his thoughts.

So, anyway, finally, it’s over. No more ads, at least until your next local elections. As someone on Twitter wrote, we can get back to Cialis and Viagra commercials. But for awhile, I won’t cringe at each commercial break expecting to hear some group from outside Indiana tell me how horrible candidate X or Y would be for Indiana. Although I’m sure we’ll start hearing about 2016 hopefuls spending time in Iowa and New Hampshire soon enough. Jeb Bush v. Hillary just to make everyone want to shoot themselves?

And now, instead of checking my batch of political websites 100 times a day, I can go back to worrying about important things like whether I should get an iPad mini or not and who is going to score for KU this season. Forward!

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I’m willing to give him a little benefit of the doubt. He’s not a great public speaker and maybe he just got tongue tied. But holy crap, why can’t people just say, “Listen, I’m against abortion no matter what. Rape is an awful thing, but I’m against abortion,”instead of going down these disgusting semantic sidebars where they try to decide what rape really is? ↩
Trumps, small t. Not Trump, capital T. ↩

Obstructing Democracy

November 6, 2012 / DB

Normally when I vote, I head to the polls, wait my turn, and then cast my ballot. This year, though, I’m going to mix things up. I keep hearing about voter intimidation in some states, and it sounds like something I’d like to learn more about. So today I plan on the following forms of intimidation:

Standing extremely close to the person in front of me in line. While doing so I will alternate between ignoring their annoyed looks and moving closer each time they attempt to create more space, and glowering at them with my meanest look possible.
Heckling other voters as I would do an opponent shooting free throws. Screaming, yelling, jumping up-and-down, waving my arms, etc. Anything to distract them from the task at hand.
Stepping in front of people when it’s their turn to vote. Shuffle left, shuffle right, just stay in their way. After a few moments of that I’ll stop, turn to an imaginary camera, laugh, and say, “And that’s the scene here, Chuck. Back to you in the studio.”

I don’t understand why so many people talk about voter intimidation as if it’s a bad thing. It sounds like a lot of fun!

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Stuffing The Mailbox

November 2, 2012 / DB

OK, I take it back. One more political post, although I think this one isn’t likely to annoy anyone.

We’ve got a ton of political mailings this year, more than any year I can remember. That’s been fueled by a tight race for Dick Lugar’s US Senate seat and a battle for our state senate seat that is very tough thanks to redistricting. In these final days before Election Day the mailers are flooding in. Yesterday alone we got five.

One was particularly odd.

It came from a group that I would assume, based on its name, to be backing Republican candidates based. But it said nothing about any candidates, any ballot issues, any parties, or anything else we’ll be voting on in Indiana. Instead it thanked me for voting in the past. Then it said they had conducted an audit of voting records and thought I would like to see whether or not my neighbors had voted. Below was a list of six people around us with whether they had voted in 2008 and 2010 noted next to their names and addresses. Then came a promise to update the audit after this year’s election and to share those results.

I wasn’t sure whether it was just weird or freaky. What was I supposed to do with this information? Go badger the people who were listed as not voting to get off their asses and vote for the same people I plan on voting for? Or use it to go door-to-door to my neighbors who weren’t listed either way and start asking nosey questions about their voting habits? Or just sit in quiet judgement of the people around me?

Anyone can access voting records. But collating the data like this and then sending out mass mailings feels a little creepy to me.

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They Get Them Young

October 31, 2012 / DB

What follows is, I hope, my only political post of the season.

I belong to no organized party. I am a Democrat.

Will Rogers

I’ve always thought Republicans were better at coming together as a single party than Democrats. Sure, Republicans have plenty of problems within their party, but come Election Day, the anti-tax millionaires from the big cities and the Bible thumping farmers from the county have a much easier time voting for the same candidates than the various wings of the Democratic party. They may have to hold their nose while they do it, but Republicans are much better staying on message.
For example, over the weekend somehow our girls and our friends’ kids starting talking about politics. I think it was all the signs stuck in everyone’s yards. Anyway, one of the boys said that his grandfather told him if Obama wins, he’s going to cancel Halloween. M. quickly piped up that she wanted Romney to win.
Now I haven’t said much about the election to the girls, except when they ask. And even then, I tend to explain things in the most general of terms. They barely grasp what I’m saying, anyway, so there’s no need to weigh them down with the details of fiscal policies, the candidates’ views on the Middle East, etc. When they ask, I tell them I’m voting for Obama and usually vote for Democrats. But that’s pretty much it.
However, I wasn’t thrilled as M. shouted out her desire for Romney to win over-and-over. I finally suggested that different people have different views on politics, and not everyone likes talking about those differences, so let’s stop talking about it. And no one was canceling Halloween.
That worked for awhile, but eventually the “Obama will cancel Halloween” meme spread through all five kids. C. came rushing up to me, worried, and asked in a pitiful voice, “Are they going to cancel Halloween if Obama wins?”

I’d had enough.

“M., when is Halloween?” I snapped.
“Next week.”
“When is the election?”
“Umm, after that?”
“Yes. The election is AFTER Halloween. No one is canceling Halloween. Stop talking about it.”
I think I may have been a little more forceful than I remember, because all five kids stopped and stared at me for a moment, wondering what was up with the crazy dad. But I think they got my message.
Still, you have to admire how one Republican grandfather pushed at least four kids into being advocates for Romney through one made up story about the next holiday. If he would have said Obama was canceling Christmas, I might have had a harder time setting the kids straight.

Convenient Historical Perspectives

May 10, 2012 / DB

Tuesday was primary election day in Indiana. The state continued its shift to the far right, selecting several candidates for the general election who have narrow views of both US history and how our nation should be governed going forward.

I’m fascinated by how many politicians run around saying that they want to return our government to the ideals that the Founding Fathers had in mind. Why are so many voters so dumb as to believe the Founders had a monolithic view of government? There were a shitload of Founders, and they didn’t all agree on everything. The constitutional process was contentious and many of those involved in creating our government left with bad feelings about the final result. Yet to hear some folks today, the Founders were all on the same page and their 18th Century view of the world is unquestionably the best way to govern in the 21st Century.

Tuesday, long-time Indiana senator Dick Lugar was trounced in the Republican primary by a candidate who toes the Tea Party line and has said he will refuse to ever compromise with senators who hold differing views. The nominee, Richard Mourdock, said that Lugar – a genuinely decent man who spent his entire career carving out a place in the Senate where all views were aired and respected even if eventually voted against – and his style are to blame for all that ills America. So the “constitutionalist” is saying that a man who represented Indiana in a manner that most Founding Fathers would likely approve of, regardless of their ideology, is the one who has caused the problems while narrow-minded, obstructionists like Mourdock are the ones who will cure what ails our country.

Our country is in trouble because members of both parties, in all branches of government, have refused to make tough choices and ask America to make sacrifices for generations. Republicans see spending cuts/tax reductions as the only way to get the economy back on track, and are intent on gutting every part of government except for Defense. Democrats have pushed forward new spending programs while refusing to take honest, long-overdue assessments of existing programs that could result in significant changes in benefits and budget savings.

To get this nation back on track, it will not take conservative or liberal policies, or even some wishy-washy centrist solution. It will take members of both parties, in all offices, talking honestly and openly about what things we need to change to move forward. There will be new taxes, whether the Republicans like it or not. There will be fundamental changes to the old school entitlement programs, whether Democrats like it or not. And to get there without completely wrecking the economy in the process, it will take open-minded, contentious debate, not digging their heels in and refusing to move away from narrow views. Politicians must take political risks and actually be honest with Americans for a change, instead of blaming the other side and insisting that their plan is the only way to fix things. And we’re all going to have to give something up. Wall Street and Main Street. The 1% and the 99%. Majority and minorities. Cities, suburbs, and farms.

Richard Mourdock is right that fixing our country will involve honoring what the Founding Fathers did when they built the foundations for our government. Where he’s wrong, though, is in his imagined belief that the Founders were a singular entity with one view of the world and how government should work. He’s forgetting that the Founders were many, had different perspectives, and believed in the power of debate and compromise. The “miracle” of American government that has allowed this nation to survive civil and global war, economic catastrophe, and political turmoil, is their compromises to ensure that all segments of the country were represented in government. Something the Tea Partiers seem to forget.

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R.I.P. Facts

April 24, 2012 / DB

Perhaps the column I’m linking to here is elitist and out-of-touch. But given the state of political discourse in this country, I think intelligent people of all political perspectives will find both truth and humor in this brilliant little piece of commentary/satire.

Through the 19th and 20th centuries, Facts reached adulthood as the world underwent a shift toward proving things true through the principles of physics and mathematical modeling. There was respect for scientists as arbiters of the truth, and Facts itself reached the peak of its power. But those halcyon days would not last. People unable to understand how science works began to question Facts. And at the same time there was a rise in political partisanship and a growth in the number of media outlets that would disseminate information, rarely relying on feedback from Facts.

Shocking Poll Results

September 23, 2010 / DB

The Onion nails it.

1 in 5 Americans Believe Obama is a Cactus

”I don’t care what he says or what his people say or what anybody else says,” 48-year-old Kansas resident Jake Nolan told reporters. “The guy’s a cactus, plain and simple. I mean, Christ, look at him.”