Monday, June 30, 2008

Mock Outrage

from CJR's Campaign Desk

Friday, June 27, 2008

No Excuse to Not Not Vote


Source Amnesia

and emotional selection. Let the campaign begin. . . .

Money Still = Speech

From the Times:

The Supreme Court on Thursday struck down a law meant to level the financial playing field when rich candidates pay for their own political campaigns.

The 5-to-4 decision, legal experts said, was significant for rejecting the rationale behind the law, known as the “millionaire’s amendment,” and for confirming the court’s continuing skepticism about the constitutionality of campaign finance regulations.

“Supporters of reasonable campaign finance regulation are now zero for three in the Roberts court,” said Richard L. Hasen, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. “This is a signal of what is to come. What could easily fall following this case are the longstanding limits on corporate and union spending in federal elections.”

The law at issue in Thursday’s decision imposed special rules in races with candidates who finance their own campaigns. Those candidates are required to disclose more information, and their opponents are allowed to raise more money.

. . . .

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., writing for the majority, said the asymmetry imposed by the law was unacceptable. “We have never upheld the constitutionality of a law that imposes different contribution limits for candidates who are competing against each other,” Justice Alito wrote.

The law allows opponents of candidates for the House who spend more than $350,000 of their own money to receive triple the usual amounts — $6,900 rather than $2,300 — from individual contributors when a complex statutory formula is met. The law also waives limits on expenditures from political parties.

The law was a response to Supreme Court rulings that forbid limits on the amount that candidates can spend on their own behalf. But Justice Alito wrote that the legislative response was unconstitutional because it “imposes an unprecedented penalty on any candidate who robustly exercises” free speech rights guaranteed by the First Amendment. Rich candidates, Justice Alito said, must “choose between the First Amendment right to engage in unfettered political speech and subjection to discriminatory fund-raising limitations.”

Thursday, June 19, 2008

Much Better

"Remembering Russert," from FAIR
. . . In reality, Meet the Press was the venue for some of the White House's most audacious lies about the Iraq War--most of which went unchallenged by Russert. On the morning that the New York Times published a front-page article falsely touting the now-famous "aluminum tubes" as components of an alleged Iraqi nuclear weapons program, Vice President Dick Cheney appeared on Meet the Press (9/8/02), where Russert pursued open-ended questions that seemed to invite spin from the vice president on Iraqi nuclear weapons.

Recalling such softball questioning, it's easy to believe the advice that Cheney press aide Cathie Martin says she gave when the Bush administration had to respond to charges that it manipulated pre-Iraq War intelligence: "I suggested we put the vice president on Meet the Press, which was a tactic we often used," she said (Salon, 1/26/07). "It's our best format."

In Bill Moyers' documentary "Buying the War" (PBS, 4/25/07), Russert expressed the wish that dissenting sources would have contacted him: "My concern was, is that there were concerns expressed by other government officials. And to this day, I wish my phone had rung, or I had access to them." Of course, any journalist could have found such sources--and certainly few critics of the war would have passed up an opportunity to air their views on such a prominent media platform. . . .

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Hmm

. . . or die

"Tony Schwartz, a self-taught, sought-after and highly reclusive media consultant who helped create what is generally considered to be the most famous political ad to appear on television, died Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 84. . . . “Media consultant” is barely adequate to describe Mr. Schwartz’s portfolio. In a career of more than half a century, he was an art director; advertising executive; urban folklorist (in one project, capturing the cacophony of New York streets on phonograph records); radio host; Broadway sound designer; college professor; media theorist; author; and maker of commercials for products, candidates and causes. What was more, Mr. Schwartz, who had suffered from agoraphobia since the age of 13, accomplished most of these things entirely within his Manhattan home. Of the thousands of television and radio advertisements on which Mr. Schwartz worked, none is as well known, or as controversial, as the so-called “daisy ad,” made for Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidential campaign."

Sunday, June 15, 2008

Something missing?

Take a look at this NYT article, "Charging by the Byte to Curb Internet Traffic." Oddly, no mention of the words "net neutrality," or the substance of that long-standing (in internet years) debate, which has resulted in some reasonably substantive Congressional hearings and efforts at regulation that would protect access and limit the ability of service providers to discriminate on the basis of content. For the neutrality advocate's perspective, see here. For a more, ahem, neutral overview, see the wiki. It's decent. And while I'm complaining about the Times (well, Brad De Long has cornered the market on complaining about the Washington Post), take a look at this article on a protest directed at LES gentrification: does it seem a wee bit snide to you? ". . . the opening of the East Village summer social season"? Or is the tone actually somewhat affectionate, and I'm reading it wrong?

Against Hagiography

From The Washington Monthly, last December:
. . . . .Actually, the balls [Tim] Russert favors may be hard, but the pitches he throws aren't curveballs, which go someplace useful. They're sillyballs, which go somewhere pointless. Russert has created a strike zone of his own where toughness meets irrelevance. John McCain entered the zone last May, when he went on the show and repeatedly asserted that the Bush tax cuts had increased the federal government's revenue. Hearing this, a tough but conscientious journalist might have pointed out that this is demonstrably false. Russert, however, reached for a trusty hardball and sent it sailing. McCain, he pointed out, was now supporting extending the very same Bush tax cuts that he had once opposed.

. . . . the unbearable inanity of Russert transcends partisanship. It's an equal-opportunity bias against anyone with anything substantive to say.

. . . . . .To say that such exercises offer no information would be unfair. But the information is purely meta. Viewers watch a candidate getting grilled by Russert not to assess the candidate's views but to assess his or her ability to withstand the grilling.

. . . . . Russert's goal isn't to inform his audience. He's there to "make news"—to get his guest to say something embarrassing that lands in the next day's papers or on the NBC Nightly News. The politicians, in turn, go on the show determined not to make news. And why do they bother? Because, as Geraghty has noted, it's a rite of passage, and any politician too chicken to play Russert's inane games would never garner the respect of the political class.

John Cole observes that the wall-to-wall teevee encomnium is a product of the fact that DC reporters/newsreaders "have walked the corridors of power so long that they honestly think they are the story" (although, to be fair, this is hardly the only incidence of hour-after-hour coverage of a small story). The related problem, of course, as Ygelsias writes earier in the Washington Monthly article, is this:
Russert's brand of journalism, rather than being ghettoized as a pointless or perverse form of entertainment—like shoulder self-dislocation or cat surfing—has immense influence.

Saturday, June 14, 2008

Monday, June 09, 2008

Another Candidate

for The Turning Point. Needlenose offers this entry:

Friday, June 06, 2008

Sometimes it's Useful

just to have a little perspective. Note where our Sun is marked on this artist's rendering of what some astrophysicists think our galaxy may look like from afar. . . . .

Thursday, June 05, 2008

How Dem Primary Voters Voted

Very, very cool animated data. . . . .

The Turning Pont

Perhaps this fall I can get some students (anyone? anyone? Bueller?) to help devise and execute a study to test this hunch (it's not really even a hypothesis, yet): this was the turning point in the primary campaign; not the cause, necessarily, but the marker of some moment at which significant change happened.



It inevitably brings this to mind:

Wednesday, June 04, 2008

Tuesday, June 03, 2008

Monday, June 02, 2008

An Architect on the Media, on On the Media

Lesions in Wernicke’s Area?

From Scientific American:
Self-medication may be the reason the blogosphere has taken off. Scientists (and writers) have long known about the therapeutic benefits of writing about personal experiences, thoughts and feelings. But besides serving as a stress-coping mechanism, expressive writing produces many physiological benefits. Research shows that it improves memory and sleep, boosts immune cell activity and reduces viral load in AIDS patients, and even speeds healing after surgery. A study in the February issue of the Oncologist reports that cancer patients who engaged in expressive writing just before treatment felt markedly better, mentally and physically, as compared with patients who did not.

Scientists now hope to explore the neurological underpinnings at play, especially considering the explosion of blogs. According to Alice Flaherty, a neuroscientist at Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital, the placebo theory of suffering is one window through which to view blogging. As social creatures, humans have a range of pain-related behaviors, such as complaining, which acts as a “placebo for getting satisfied,” Flaherty says. Blogging about stressful experiences might work similarly.

Flaherty, who studies conditions such as hypergraphia (an uncontrollable urge to write) and writer’s block, also looks to disease models to explain the drive behind this mode of communication. For example, people with mania often talk too much. “We believe something in the brain’s limbic system is boosting their desire to communicate,” Flaherty explains. Located mainly in the midbrain, the limbic system controls our drives, whether they are related to food, sex, appetite, or problem solving. “You know that drives are involved [in blogging] because a lot of people do it compulsively,” Flaherty notes. Also, blogging might trigger dopamine release, similar to stimulants like music, running and looking at art.

The frontal and temporal lobes, which govern speech—no dedicated writing center is hardwired in the brain—may also figure in. For example, lesions in Wernicke’s area, located in the left temporal lobe, result in excessive speech and loss of language comprehension. People with Wernicke’s aphasia speak in gibberish and often write constantly. In light of these traits, Flaherty speculates that some activity in this area could foster the urge to blog.

The rest here. . . .