Gil Fulbright For President

"I may not be qualified to be president, but a dramatic camera angle can make me look like a president." - Gil Fulbright

Donald Trump is not qualified to be president, and nothing can make him look like a president. I'd rather vote for Gil Fulbright than vote for Donald Trump. I think that Trump would do things that would be destructive. I don't think Fulbright would do anything, and maybe that would be a good thing. At least he would tell the truth. I also think that Fulbright would give better speeches than Thedonald.

The truth behind fake political ads:

"Honest Gil" Fulbright isn't a real candidate. He's an actor, and Gil's campaign for the White House is a satire that's been viewed more than three million times on social media.

It makes you chuckle, but there is a serious point to his pitch.

"He's just shining a light on how politicians are routinely being bribed by special interest lobbyists, and swaying their votes in their favor, and the people who are left out are we, the American people," said Josh Silver, the director of represent.us, the grassroots organization behind Gil Fulbright that's working to pass laws combating the influence of moneyed interests in American politics.

"To be successful," said Reynolds, "you would need to have these guys in Congress vote against their self interest, right?"

"Well, that's why we're doing what we're doing," Silver said.

It is my belief that the world would be a better place if people stayed home on Sunday morning and watched "CBS Sunday Morning".

Extremist Views

Why Sam Harris and Noam Chomsky are Both Right:

Bringing the discussion full circle, Harris is correct in asserting that beliefs influence actions. In particular, apocalyptic beliefs can be used to excuse virtually any act of violence and treachery on the grounds that the present moment is one of cosmic significance and urgency. But beliefs don’t exist in a vacuum. The material conditions in which people find themselves can have a profound influence on the sort of worldview they adopt. And this is where Chomsky is correct. The West has an absolutely sordid history of aggressive, self-interested, and morally questionable meddling in the affairs of Middle Eastern countries. The debacle known as the Iraq War created a situation of widespread desperation that's seduced a whole generation of religiously-inclined people to latch onto extremist views they otherwise wouldn't have accepted. In turn, these views then modified their behavioral patterns in ideologically specific ways.

Religion Poisons Political Rhetoric

"In religion, faith is a virtue. In science, faith is a vice." - Jerry Coyne

Religion poisons progress.

If a person can believe in something without any proof, it follows that they can believe in anything without any proof. A large group of people such as these form the basis of the Republican Party. They believe in anything that they want to believe in. Logic and proof are not a necessary part of their thinking, hence their thinking is incredibly limited. Black and white, zeros and ones, on and off; no grey areas exist for them. Abortion is "baby killing", climate change is not man-made, birth control is wrong, marriage is between a man and a woman, and on and on. Flexibility and compromise are non-existent. They think that they are always right.

Republicans are not reasonable people because so many of them are religious. Reason and religion are like oil and water. Religion defines the current Republican Party. It defines the issues they consider to be important. It defines what and who they will vote for, and the rest of us be damned for wanting a world that isn't so medieval.

Just look at some of today's headlines:

Fiorina makes distortion of Planned Parenthood a centerpiece

Abortion, birth control, race top Supreme Court's agenda

Vatican fires gay priest on eve of synod

It looks like Pope Francis is not so liberal and progressive after all. It looks like he is judgemental after all.

To true progressives and liberals these issues are not political issues at all. In fact they are all legal in the United States. They are only political issues because Republicans force them to be issues. Somehow these issues become more important than murders, crime, infrastructure needs, poverty, pollution, etc. I think that all of us would like the world to be a better place. It is therefore ironic that the Religious Republicans impede many solutions that could do just that.

Belief trumps logic in the minds of the Religious Republican. Debate and discussion become totally useless. Evidence, science and logic become totally useless. In their minds they are always right. They are proud of their idiotic arrogance. They are not content to live in a country that allows them to have their beliefs. They want to legalize their beliefs so that the rest of us are forced to be like them.

They believe that religion is what makes America great. I believe that the Enlightenment is what makes America great, and never the twain shall meet.

Because we are a democracy, a large number of Religious Republicans can make the United States a hellish place to be for the rest of us. 

As E.O. Wilson says, we have become dysfunctional.

"I’m not a Marxist, but Marx got at least one thing right: for many, religion weakens the incentive to fix both personal and societal problems." - Jerry Coyne

"For good people to do evil doesn’t require only religion, or even any religion, but simply one of its key elements: belief without evidence—in other words, faith. And that kind of faith is seen not just in religion, but in any authoritarian ideology that puts dogma above truth and frowns on dissent." - Jerry Coyne

"But the God hypothesis for morality and altruism has its own problems. It fails, for example, to specify exactly which moral judgments were instilled in people by God and which, if any, might rest on secular reason. It doesn’t explain why slavery, torture, and disdain for women and strangers were considered proper behaviors not too long ago, but are now seen as immoral. For if anything is true, God-given morality should remain constant over time and space. In contrast, if morality reflects a malleable social veneer on an evolutionary base, it should change as society changes. And it has." - Jerry Coyne 

Just read Faith vs. Fact, for god's sake.

The Nonsense Game

“It wouldn’t be cricket…” as the British say.

Politics seems to be a game that has no rules. A game with no rules is a nonsensical game.

From The Endless Nonsense by Josh Marshall:

The truth is, until President Obama got into office and Republicans needed a new political attack angle, the idea barely occurred to anyone that you wouldn't do a regular trial with someone you had plenty of evidence against.

Political Action And Scientific Result

Can political action change the outcome of a science experiment? Can ‘scientists’ get away with lying and faking the truth? Correct me if I’m wrong, but Sarah Palin seems to believe that these things are true. I do not believe that either one is true.

We all are participating in one of the largest science experiments that has ever been undertaken. The stakes are enormous. The worst case scenario is the eradication of all life on earth. Sarah Palin seems to think that some petty infighting among some scientists (and yes, perhaps some data fudging and lies) means that global warming is a hoax. She seems to think that because some scientists lie, that means that all scientists must lie. (Makes me think of politicians, for some reason.) Palin also seems to be arguing that the economy trumps all, even science. I wonder how the economy will be doing when we are all dead?

I have a proposal. It could even be a new reality TV show. Would Sarah Palin be willing to participate in a science experiment? How long does she think she could sustain her life if she were put in a sealed enclosure which had a constant source of carbon monoxide being pumped into it. She could have some plants, trees, salmon, and polar bears in there with her to make her feel at home. I know that this is an oversimplification, however the reality is that we put all kinds of bad things into our air, atmosphere, and water. Why is Sarah Palin not concerned about this? I know that I am. Why does she think that global warming is a hoax? I know that I don’t.

From Copenhagen's political science by Sarah Palin:

In his inaugural address, President Obama declared his intention to "restore science to its rightful place." But instead of staying home from Copenhagen and sending a message that the United States will not be a party to fraudulent scientific practices, the president has upped the ante. He plans to fly in at the climax of the conference in hopes of sealing a "deal." Whatever deal he gets, it will be no deal for the American people. What Obama really hopes to bring home from Copenhagen is more pressure to pass the Democrats' cap-and-tax proposal. This is a political move. The last thing America needs is misguided legislation that will raise taxes and cost jobs -- particularly when the push for such legislation rests on agenda-driven science.

Without trustworthy science and with so much at stake, Americans should be wary about what comes out of this politicized conference. The president should boycott Copenhagen.

What “trustworthy science” is Palin basing all of this on? Why isn’t what she is saying and doing “politicizing” the issue? Is it even possible for a political issue to not be politicized?

Palin doesn’t want Obama to go to Copenhagen. I want him to go. Does my wish cancel out hers? The president should not boycott Copenhagen. There. That settles it.

Palin bases much of her outrage over ‘Climate-gate’ (as she calls it) on emails that some hackers discovered. I’m still outraged over these emails. Is she?

Political scandal seems never ending. Scientific scandal always seems to lead to the truth eventually. Is global warming a hoax? Do we want time to tell?

Whether or not global warming is a hoax or not seems to be irrelevant to the argument that Sarah Palin is trying to make. She seems to be in favor of air and water pollution. Does she not think these things are bad for us?

Update:
Here is more on all of this. There is also this and this.

Update:
Only right wing Republicans use the phrase "cap and tax." The rest use the term "cap and trade." To use the phrase "cap and tax" means that one is making a "political move."

Divided We Fall

From American Aparthood by Glenn W. Smith:

The Right believes humankind is sorted naturally upon a ladder. The Left believes we walk together upon a bridge.

For the Right, freedom means the recognition of a natural, hierarchical order. By "democracy" the Right means a system that makes sure the "poor and despised" do not usurp the power of those above them on the ladder. The Right says it does not seek to "eat up the poor," though the enforced euthanasia of our health care system puts the lie to that claim.

The Right's worldview is not just an ad hoc, cynical justification of selfishness. It is a meaningful, if destructive, worldview, a worldview that produces aparthood as a reasoned solution to the unpredictable dangers of our lives together in a hostile universe.

As we run up against the resource limits that betray the pacifying illusion of movement up their ladder of life, the Right is panicking.

Human sociality is full of ladders and bridges. The theoretical genius of American democracy lies in this recognition. The Right shares the Framers' skepticism of the masses, but rejects the Framers' much more alarmed skepticism of unchecked authority. The Framers understood that human nature was not an unchanging thing, that humans could not be fixed to permanent, isolated places on a ladder the powerful lower from above.

Disgusting Political Social Games

From Would You Slap Your Father? If So, You’re a Liberal by Nicholas D. Kristof:

One of the main divides between left and right is the dependence on different moral values. For liberals, morality derives mostly from fairness and prevention of harm. For conservatives, morality also involves upholding authority and loyalty — and revulsion at disgust.

Some evolutionary psychologists believe that disgust emerged as a protective mechanism against health risks, like feces, spoiled food or corpses. Later, many societies came to apply the same emotion to social “threats.” Humans appear to be the only species that registers disgust…

Conservatives systematically register more disgust than liberals.

It appears that we start with moral intuitions that our brains then find evidence to support. For example, one experiment involved hypnotizing subjects to expect a flash of disgust at the word “take.” They were then told about Dan, a student council president who “tries to take topics that appeal to both professors and students.”

The research subjects felt disgust but couldn’t find any good reason for it. So, in some cases, they concocted their own reasons, such as: “Dan is a popularity-seeking snob.”

So how do we discipline our brains to be more open-minded, more honest, more empirical? A start is to reach out to moderates on the other side — ideally eating meals with them, for that breaks down “us vs. them” battle lines that seem embedded in us. (In ancient times we divided into tribes; today, into political parties.) The Web site www.civilpolitics.org is an attempt to build this intuitive appreciation for the other side’s morality, even if it’s not our morality.

“Minds are very hard things to open, and the best way to open the mind is through the heart,” Professor Haidt says. “Our minds were not designed by evolution to discover the truth; they were designed to play social games.”

Who's Got The Power?

From Is The Hunter Being Captured By The Game? by Danny Schechter:

The mistake that many make is to confuse the trappings of symbolic power with the exercise of real power. Truth be told, real power is exercised mostly by unchecked private interests, lobbyists and our media. They have the power to obstruct policies, stir up controversies and orchestrate pressure to kill measures they don't like. They are well-funded minority and work skillfully in the shadows and through highly paid PR practitioners.

Every politician knows that these non-elected power centers often have more power than elected decision makers. They know that Congress is a swamp of competing interests catering to provincial needs.

Powerful lobbies from two private sector complexes and one country have disproportionate clout. There's the long-standing military-industrial complex, there's the financialized credit and loan complex and there are the bully boys of Israeli hegemony.

Left And Right And Good And Evil

I like moments of clarity and definition. Sometimes a book, an essay, a television interview, a poem, or a discussion with a friend can give you a moment of clarity and definition. Hopefully the moment will endure in your memory; because you have been given words and thoughts that clearly express something that was hazy and foggy before. It is strange to read someone that you think is totally wrong in their thinking and have it lead to a moment of clarity and definition. That’s what happened to me yesterday. (For the curious it was this and this that I read.)

The end result of all of this is a theory, or perhaps it is simply an observation. There is a fundamental difference between those who lean to the left politically from those who lean to the right politically. The difference is defined by the word potential. The difference is defined by the words good and evil.

Pick a topic of contention between the left and the right. The left sees the potential for good, the right sees evil to be feared. Let’s use welfare as an example. The left sees the welfare recipient as a potentially good person down on their luck, someone who needs a helping hand, someone who is a contributing member of society in their own right, someone who may potentially contribute even more to society in the future. The right sees a bad person, a leech sucking at the government teat taking away all of their money.

Let’s try another one. There is always “the big scary other.” For the right this is a seemingly never ending category. It could be the scary black man, the scary Mexicans, the scary “terrorist”, the scary atheist, the scary person out to steal their jobs, the scary gay person… and on and on. Once again, the person on the left sees potential and the possibility or actuality of good people. The person on the right sees evil people. (The person on the right even sees an “axis of evil.”) The person on the left thinks that prisons and drug treatment centers should rehabilitate, that our neighbors are our brothers, and that diversity is a good thing. The person on the left is willing to talk to the “other” even if some label him a “terrorist.” (“One man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter.”) The person on the left believes in freedom of and from religion, and the separation of church and state. The person on the left believes that we all deserve the chance to work to support ourselves and our families. The person on the left sees good people no matter what the color of their skin, no matter what their creed, no matter what their sexual orientation. The person on the right sees people out to get them. The person on the right thinks that diversity is a bad thing and is afraid of those who are different. The “big scary other” will someday kill them, rape them, take their job, torture them and then kill them again, take Christmas from them, force them to stop believing in Jesus, take marriage away from them, and the biggest fear of all: take away some, perhaps all, of their money. (Even taking away a little bit seems to be intolerable to the person on the right, hence the reason why they will vote for tax breaks above all else.)

Let’s try another. Abortion. The left sees a woman who will agonize to make the decision that is right for her and her fetus. The right sees an evil murderer.

One last example. William Ayers. The left sees someone who made mistakes in the past, someone who has always been passionate in his beliefs, someone who is currently doing many good things. The right sees a terrorist who should be destroyed, someone to be used for their own political gain.

The left wants to give people other than themselves a chance to make something of themselves, to contribute to a better society. They see that in the long run this will benefit us all. The right sees people who should be left out on the street to fend for themselves, or put in prison to fend for themselves, or be killed. (Or in the words of Arlo Guthrie “…all kinds of mean nasty ugly looking people on the bench there. Mother rapers. Father stabbers. Father rapers! Father rapers sitting right there on the bench next to me! And they was mean and nasty and ugly and horrible crime-type guys sitting on the bench next to me. And the meanest, ugliest, nastiest one, the meanest father raper of them all, was coming over to me and he was mean 'n' ugly 'n' nasty 'n' horrible and all kind of things…”) The right cannot imagine how improving the lives of those with less could possibly be of any benefit to them. The left tends to put the welfare and reputations of other people ahead of its own political gain. The right tends to destroy the welfare and reputations of other people for its own political gain.

The left imagines good and sees potential, the right imagines evil and wants to kill potential. When the left imagines others looking at the left, it sees what it would want others to see. When the right imagines others looking at the right, it sees only itself, and is afraid of what it sees.

I choose potential and hope over fear and killing. I choose to see good before I see evil.

All of this helps to explain why I detest people like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, and Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter. They have used the fear of “the big scary other” for their own personal material advancement. They view other people as either commodities to be used for their own gain, or as enemies that must be defeated. They don’t see fellow human beings. Worst of all, they have convinced millions of others to believe as they do. Even though I said that I choose to see good before I see evil, in the cesspool of Bush/Cheney/Limbaugh/Coulter and their ilk, I only see evil.

Lumpy

From Why the Ideological Melting Pot Is Getting So Lumpy by Shankar Vedantam:

Americans like to live in diverse communities. At least, that's what they say.

About two in three Americans say they prefer to live around people belonging to different races, religions and income groups. In reality, however, survey research shows that people are increasingly clustering together among those who are just like themselves, especially on the one attribute that ties the others together -- political affiliation.

A consequence of such polarization is that large numbers of Americans no longer have much contact with people belonging to the other party. Many feel the views of their political opponents are not just wrong but incomprehensible.

Dan Perkins Speaks

From Obama's War on Humor by Christopher Arnott:

Rees chronicled Bush's incompetence for seven long years but he's a newbie compared to Dan Perkins. For more than 20 years, under the nom-de-toon "Tom Tomorrow," the New Haven–based Perkins has written and drawn This Modern World, a weekly strip he syndicates to this newspaper and more than 100 others.

Perkins says in a recent phone interview that he's been receiving e-mails from conservatives snarkily saying, "I hope you're going to be as hard on Obama as you were on Bush." To which he responds, "Of course not. Bush was a fucking moron, a moral criminal. I used to take pride in not doing cartoons about the politics of the moment, but with Bush I've been chained to this, every week, because it's been so fucking outrageous. I'm feeling immense relief, giddy exhaustion."

Perkins adds, "With Obama, there's not anything to make fun of that's immediately apparent. Where the humor may turn out to be is how crazy he drives his detractors. I've been listening to [right-wing] talk radio, and their heads are about to explode.

"But I'm sure there'll be plenty of missteps. I remain appropriately cynical of any politician." Moreover, Perkins exclaims, "I reject the inherent supposition that my only job is to make fun of the occupant of the White House." He's just been working on a strip that "I don't know if you'd call it critical of Obama, but it says that after all we've been through in the past eight years, we should really go through an intensive self-examination, so it doesn't happen again. But what we will probably do is shrug and move on."

Fascinating

Fascinating, as Mr. Spock so often said on Star Trek. I am fascinated by the fact that two people can look at one thing and come to totally opposite conclusions of what that thing is. I suppose that is why the stock market bounces around so much. But I digress.

Yesterday I wrote about seeing Tom Brokaw on the Today Show. Today I added an update to what I wrote. While googling around the web for information on this subject I found someone who had copied the entire Washington Times article that I linked to in my update. What fascinates me are the comments left at this site.

Here is the first one:

Hell. I never watch any of these Red Star Hammer and Sickle Socialist Propoganda channels and the bubling old left wing incompitents who dispence the Marxist Leninist party mantra to the brain dead masses who beleive this Neocomm vomit!

These people could disembowel each other on the set of the state run nightly News and, other than watching and saying, Sick, Cool, I would say,"Good riddence, to the agents of Communism that have come here to Eff up our great nation and it's proud people!"

Our Revolution needs to be as much against this Ministry of Obama propoganda as the Marxist's and their tratiorous Anti-American pro Socialist poison that they spew on a hourly and minute by minute basis!

First of all, is it at all possible to ignore the many misspelled words? I am the first to admit that I am a rather poor speller, but in this day and age of spell checkers there is no excuse, other than neglect and lack of attention to detail, for poor spelling. Perhaps that neglect and lack of attention carries over into how this commenter processes facts and information. How else does one explain his conclusion that we have a left wing bias in the media, and that Obama is a marxist and a socialist? Has this person been living under a rock for the last eight years? The criticism of the Bush administration has been marginal, at best. If the media had been doing its job, we would not be in Iraq, Bush would never have been reelected, and he (and Cheney) would have been impeached years ago.

One thing that scares me is that this commenter is not alone in how he thinks. A quick surf around the web turns up many others that share his belief that the commies are taking over.

I actually agree with the commenter that most of the media does produce propaganda for “the brain dead masses.” However, I strongly disagree that this propaganda is socialist and/or state controlled. The propaganda is capitalist propaganda, and it is corporate controlled. The corporations control the state through the many lobbyists that they also control. Follow the money. Why is the government bailing out the financial industry and the auto industry? Do a little research and find out how much money these industries have contributed to lobbyists and politicians (of both parties) over the years. The politicians do what the corporations want them to do. If the United States ever falls, it will most likely be because of capitalism run amok. (Believe it or not, I actually have nothing against capitalism. It does however need some regulation. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and all that. Regulation does not equal communism. We have always regulated capitalism, we have never been a communist country.)

Most U.S. politicians (including Obama, and the Clintons) are centrists. They only lean a little bit to the left or right, if at all. George W. Bush is an exception. He is an extreme right-wing radical. Fat lot of good his extreme policies did for us. I would have preferred a true conservative in the White House rather than Bush. Of course my true preference would be for a true progressive/atheist in the White House, but that just ain’t gonna happen. The liberal/progressive agenda is almost invisible on the political landscape. There is Russ Feingold and… Well, nobody else. They wouldn’t let Ralph Nader debate when he was running for president way back when. Hell, they wouldn’t even let him attend the debate as an audience member.

Believe what you will, but there is no way that you can convince me that the liberal/progressive agenda, or the socialists, or communists, or Marxists have actual power in the United States.

I am trying to picture Tim Russert, David Gregory, Tom Brokaw, Katie Couric and Matt Lauer as communists. Kind of hard to do.

Now I am trying to picture Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, and Rush Limbaugh as communists. Even harder to do.

None of them share their wealth and property like a good communist/socialist ought to.

Now I’m picturing all of them as capitalists. Hmm, very easy to do.

And just who is it that started spreading the “news” that Obama is a no good commie, socialist, marxist, Anti-American, Non-American? Why, it was the no good commie, socialist, marxist, Anti-American, Non-American media. Now, why would they do that?

Fascinating.

Slim Odds For Sara Palin

From History suggests Palin's political future is dim by Joshua Spivak:

Though Sarah Palin's vice presidential run came to a losing end on Tuesday, many of her supporters are already touting her as a candidate in 2012.

Despite her poor performance in the media and in some polls, Palin, unlike McCain or the other Republican primary candidates, managed to excite the party's conservative base.

But history has a cruel lesson for anyone counting on her presidential aspirations: the losing vice presidential candidate has usually met the end of the line for a national office run.

Based on recent history, this may seem counterintuitive. After all, the winning vice presidential candidate is handed a gilded path to the nomination. Since 1952, seven of 11 vice presidents have gained their parties' presidential nomination in the next election. There is an obvious reason for this -- the vice president is running effectively as incumbent, cloaked under the mantle of the previous president. The vice president has also managed to stay in the public eye for the last four or eight years, gaining invaluable name recognition and respect from the party faithful.

But the losers have a sadder story to tell. Throughout the entirety of American history, only three losing vice presidential candidates have managed to ever come back and win their parties' nomination. And all three have exceptional stories.

Read the rest here.

In No God We Trust

From Why eventually electing an atheist would be the best idea:

OK - I know we're not ready as a Country to even consider this right now - but wouldn't it be nice if.....

Our President believed that a person gets one life - here - on Earth - and that there is no magical fairy land where you go when you die.

*That President might be a little less likely to allow the poor, the sick and the needy to suffer through the one life they were born into. They might do a little more to care for those in other areas of our World who, through no fault of their own don't have the resources to provide even basic services for their citizens. So they suffer and die in horrible conditions and death is sometimes a welcome predator. That President might be more willing to mobilize our vast potential for good and provide a better life for those people.

*That President might be a little less likely to allow our men and women bravely serving us in the military to die for needless wars, and might actually feel guilty for killing human beings (even if they are brown) because he knows that when they die, they don't get a harem full of beautiful virgins to ravage as they please. They know that a bullet or a bomb is ending forever the hopes and dreams of a human being.

*That President might be a little less likely to rape and pillage the environment, because they know this planet is the only one we have and that there is no supernatural being coming back to take us all to a better place. THIS IS OUR BETTER PLACE - and he would know that we need to protect it.

Brand Names

From Want Fries With Your Vote? by Dennis Perrin:

Personally, I don't see the point to political yard signs. Yes, it announces your preference, but it also solidifies your spectator status. All you are doing is providing free ad space to corporate candidates and parties. If one charged a party with yard rental fees, I'd understand the allure. But instead, people willingly display brand names that have little if any real connection to their personal lives. It's analagous to wearing NFL or NBA gear -- which is fine, if you like the look. I just wonder how long it will be before we simply cut to the chase and have bar codes tattooed to our foreheads.

"It's wrong and it's dangerous"

From Atheists: The Last Political Outcasts by Sally Quinn:

Bob Tiernan is an agnostic. "I'm not a hard-core atheist", he says. He was raised a Catholic and went to Jesuit College and law school. He is a practicing lawyer who specializes in issues involving separation of church and state. He is also a Democrat. This week he was in Denver to protest what he sees as the dangerous mixing of religion and politics, and the sad exlusion of non-believers in a party known for its inclusiveness.

On Sunday, Tiernan attended the first event at the Democratic National Convention, an Interfaith Gathering attended by some 2,000 people at the Colorado Convention Center. Speaking were distinguished priests, rabbis, imams and religion scholars. "I sat through, I guess I'd have to call it, a service," says Tiernan. "People were responding in unison. In the middle, Leah Daughtry (a pastor and CEO of the Democratic National Convention Committee) spoke and said that despite what the media says, Democrats are people of faith."

Tiernan says he couldn't stand it any more. "I stood up and said, 'I'm a democrat but I'm not a person of faith.' I said, 'This looks like a church service to me and I never thought I would see the Democrats doing something like this." At that point, the police came and escorted Tiernan from the hall. They told him he could leave or stay and see what the Democrats wanted to do with him, so he stayed but nobody did anything so he left.

"The thing is," says Tiernan with a chuckle, "I'm not a career protester. I just don't like religion mixed with politics. It's wrong and it's dangerous."

Read the rest here.

Oil And Water

From More Americans Question Religion's Role in Politics:

Some Americans are having a change of heart about mixing religion and politics. A new survey finds a narrow majority of the public saying that churches and other houses of worship should keep out of political matters and not express their views on day-to-day social and political matters. For a decade, majorities of Americans had voiced support for religious institutions speaking out on such issues.

Read the rest here.

Misgovernment For Profit

From Follow This Dime - Why Misgovernment Was No Accident in George W. Bush's Washington by Thomas Frank:

Washington is the city where the scandals happen. Every American knows this, but we also believe, if only vaguely, that the really monumental scandals are a thing of the past, that the golden age of misgovernment-for-profit ended with the cavalry charge and the robber barons, at about the same time presidents stopped wearing beards.

I moved to Washington in 2003, just in time for the comeback, for the hundred-year flood. At first it was only a trickle in the basement, a little stream released accidentally by the president's friends at Enron. Before long, though, the levees were failing all over town, and the city was inundated with a muddy torrent of graft.

How are we to dissect a deluge like this one? We might begin by categorizing the earmarks handed out by Congress, sorting the foolish earmarks from the costly earmarks from the earmarks made strictly on a cash basis. We could try a similar approach to government contracting: the no-bid contracts, the no-oversight contracts, the no-experience contracts, the contracts handed out to friends of the vice president. We might consider the shoplifting career of one of the president's former domestic policy advisers or the habitual plagiarism of the president's liaison to the Christian right. And we would certainly have to find some way to parse the extraordinary incompetence of the executive branch, incompetence so fulsome and steady and reliable that at some point Americans stopped being surprised and began simply to count on it, to think of incompetence as the way government works.

But the onrushing flow swamps all taxonomies. Mass firing of federal prosecutors; bribing of newspaper columnists; pallets of shrink-wrapped cash "misplaced" in Iraq; inexperienced kids running the Baghdad stock exchange; the discovery that many of Alaska's leading politicians are apparently on the take -- our heads swim. We climb to the rooftop, but we cannot find the heights of irony from which we might laugh off the blend of thug and Pharisee that was Tom DeLay -- or dispel the nauseating suspicion, quickly becoming a certainty, that the government of our nation deliberately fibbed us into a pointless, catastrophic war.

Read the rest here.

The Depths Of Ignorance

From How Ignorant Are We? The Voters Choose… but on the Basis of What? by Rick Shenkman:

Five defining characteristics of stupidity, it seems to me, are readily apparent. First, is sheer ignorance: Ignorance of critical facts about important events in the news, and ignorance of how our government functions and who's in charge. Second, is negligence: The disinclination to seek reliable sources of information about important news events. Third, is wooden-headedness, as the historian Barbara Tuchman defined it: The inclination to believe what we want to believe regardless of the facts. Fourth, is shortsightedness: The support of public policies that are mutually contradictory, or contrary to the country's long-term interests. Fifth, and finally, is a broad category I call bone-headedness, for want of a better name: The susceptibility to meaningless phrases, stereotypes, irrational biases, and simplistic diagnoses and solutions that play on our hopes and fears.

Read the rest here.

Rick Shenkman is the author of Just How Stupid Are We?: Facing the Truth About the American Voter.

Unforced Errors

I don’t recall having heard of the term “unforced errors” before today. I did not know what it meant. Google to the rescue!

From CEOs take a lesson from tennis: Unforced errors can be fatal by Del Jones:

In tennis there is something called an unforced error. Sometimes it's a routine shot that is hit out of bounds or into the net. Others it's a double fault on the serve. It's always a lost point that has little to do with the opponent. In tennis, unforced errors are a ticket to failure.

The word unforced seems kind of forced. Are there forced errors? Yes, there are, at least in tennis. A forced error is "an error resulting from a good shot by the opponent." Compare to the unforced error: "Loss of a point caused by a poorly hit shot that goes into the net or out of the court." See the difference? I don’t, but I have no interest in tennis.

It seems that many people like to apply these tennis terms to politics, especially political campaigns. Why? I don’t know. I suppose it is just another way for political types to confuse simpletons like me. I think they try to do this because they really have nothing of value to say, so they speak in jargon and gibberish. Like our current president.

To me, an error is an error, whether forced or not. This is not the case for the McCain campaign.

From McCain shakes up staff amid concern about 'unforced errors' by Dana Bash:

Sen. John McCain's campaign announced a shakeup at the top Wednesday, in the wake of growing Republican concern about its ability to compete against Sen. Barack Obama.

Campaign manager Rick Davis said Tuesday that senior adviser Steve Schmidt would take over day-to-day operations of the campaign.

Schmidt's top priority, according to a senior aide, will be to stop "unforced errors in the campaign."

Why not just use the phrase “errors in the campaign”? Why bring tennis into it. Bringing tennis into it seems elitist to me.

Now lets look at some of those errors.

More from McCain shakes up staff amid concern about 'unforced errors' by Dana Bash:

• Hiring, then firing, lobbyists who worked for the military junta in Myanmar, then creating a strict anti-lobbyist policy that caused several lobbyists to be dismissed from the campaign.


• Poor vetting that led to endorsements by controversial figures like ministers John Hagee and Rod Parsley, which McCain didn't reject until after months of bad press.


• The campaign also paid for a TV ad to distance McCain from President Bush. The ad's script read, "John McCain stood up to the president and sounded the alarm on global warming ... five years ago." McCain later reversed his position and stood with Bush on the controversial idea of offshore oil drilling.

After writing all of this I think I finally get it. For the McCain campaign these are unforced errors because they are making mistakes all by themselves. A forced error would be one they made in response to something skillful that Barack Obama had done. The picture painted for me from all of this is one of McCain as some sort of bumbling idiot that can’t even run his campaign right. Given past behavioral patterns, the American voters response to this will probably be: “Let’s put him in the White House!”

My hope is that the game of politics is more like the game of tennis than I think it is. “In tennis, unforced errors are a ticket to failure.” Maybe then Barack Obama will be our next president. I propose a new slogan for democracy: “May he who has made the least unforced errors win!” We all know that our votes don’t count anyway.

Who would have thought that you would need to understand the game of tennis in order to understand the game of political campaigning?

Maybe I’ll give tennis another try, now that I understand it better. I probably won’t though.