Pitch in

Click image for full Matt Davies/Journal News cartoon.

Don't get stuck by the pitchfork...

Misdirection

And, in my other pocket...

Click image for full Jim Morin/Miami Herald cartoon.

Oops!

Click image for full Adam Zyglis/Buffalo News cartoon.

No thumbnails to pull out of a corporation

(click here to view)

Ted Rall Universal Press Syndicate Jan 29, 2010 EditorialCartoonists.com

The Association of American Editorial Cartoonists (AAEC) is providing thumbnails. Let's see how it works.

Gaffe-hunting

Politics is about disagreement. Sure, it's about settling disagreements, but it starts with diverging opinions and, when it works, ends with a direction.

Last night, President Barack Obama disagreed with the Supreme Court's recent (and horrible) decision on corporate propaganda. This decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission continued to drive through the heart of our democracy the conservative majority's stake of an axiom that corporate money equals free speech. Obama was pointed but polite:

With all due deference to separation of powers, last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests, including foreign corporations, to spend without limit in our elections.

I don't think American elections should be bankrolled by America's most powerful interests or, worse, by foreign entities. They should be decided by the American people. And I urge Democrats and Republicans to pass a bill that helps correct some of these problems.

Yet CNN, especially the useless Paul Steinhauser, is raising its eyebrows over Obama disagreeing with the Supremes right there in front of them. Cripes, fellows, go ahead and wet your pants if you're that timorous.

Then, just to be balanced, Steinhauser tut-tuts at Samuel Alito's reaction. Watch the video. All Alito does is mouth (no, not mouth off), "That's not true." CNN implies that Alito is not allowed to visibly disagree with the President.

That is not the country I live in. Honest, polite disagreement is not a threat. The pretense of unanimity is a threat. There's a big difference between SOTU and STFU.

Steinhauser even raises the spectre of Joe Wilson's notorious intemperate outburst. Ah, now we're getting to the truth. CNN thinks it knows how to cover the story so that it need never - ever - worry about distinguishing truth from fiction, right from wrong, or Constitutional from bullshit.

A story about etiquette requires no journalism, just a lot of spouting. Orrin Hatch of course obliges:

I think [Alito] showed quite a bit of judicial restraint.

Of course, CNN let Hatch's testable assertion go unchallenged:

President Obama last night wildly mischaracterized the Supreme Court's decision.

Our media are not interested in calling bullshit. They're interested in selling bullshit.

Liberal media

The New York Times bends so far over backward to spin these wingnut wannabe junior Watergaters as "activists" that they could kiss their own asses if they just had Linda Blair's neck. To hear the alleged journalists at the Times tell it, these guys are just journalists gone slightly awry:

At least three of the men charged in the episode have backgrounds in campus journalism.

...

Mr. O’Keefe has long espoused a form of journalism that draws attention to itself.

Just pretexting their way into a Senator's phone system! What a bunch of cards! They just needed more attention. At least they weren't stinking bloggers!

All of the people the Times quotes in response are conservatives:

• Michelle Malkin
• Glenn Beck
• the so-called Leadership Institute
• a blogger at the Corner
• and one of O'Keefe's old fellow cub distorters from Rutgers

There is no excuse for an article this slanted. Even Fox would have leavened it with something it pretended was a liberal point of view. Reporters Campbell Robertson and Liz Robbins need to be on the police beat at the Post. The New York Post.

Scott Brown and abortion

Scott Brown pretends to be pro-choice, but that's a lie from him just as it was from Mitt Romney in 2002. Otherwise, Fr. Frank Pavone and the Massachusetts Citizens for Life wouldn't have both been calling on his behalf. I know they called because I received their calls myself.

Brown claims:

While this decision should ultimately be made by the woman in consultation with her doctor, I believe we need to reduce the number of abortions in America. I believe government has the responsibility to regulate in this area and I support parental consent and notification requirements and I oppose partial birth abortion. I also believe there are people of good will on both sides of the issue and we ought to work together to support and promote adoption as an alternative to abortion.

The anti-abortion activists don't care what he claims to think or even what he thinks. They only care what he'll do about judicial nominations. I sense filibusters in the offing with Brown in tow, though he'll claim that he opposes obviously centrist Democratic nominees because they're radical activists. Yeah, bullshit.

Lessons from the Coakley campaign

First, a disclaimer: I wasn't an insider in Martha Coakley's ill-fated campaign. I wasn't even a well-placed outsider. I supported Michael Capuano in the primary, mostly as a voter, and then I did a little volunteering for Coakley at the tail end of the general election. I am not a big shot, and this is merely my educated speculation.

Everyone thought this was going to be a base turnout election. I made that mistake, and it appears that Coakley's campaign did too. Their tactics were pitched at voters who know what they want; both their media ads and their direct mail - between them, practically all of the campaign - told the Democratic base not to elect a scurvy Bushist Republican.

Non-base voters are the muddled middle that the two major parties typically squeeze at the end of a general election. This middle isn't so much moderate as clueless. It's composed of people who don't pay much attention, don't ferret out actual facts from obvious bullshit when they do hear something that sounds relevant, and can't make up their minds in any lasting way about politics. About them, Abe Lincoln said, "God must have loved the common people; he made so many of them." Most of them are middle class, working class, or poor. And someone famous - apparently Josh Billings instead of Mark Twain or Will Rogers, who often get credit - said something like, "The trouble ain't that people don't know enough; it's all they know that just ain't so."

Base voters are ideological voters. You're not going to lose them to the other candidate. You're at risk for losing them to apathy. Coakley was really at risk of losing them to the temptations of the sofa or the coffeehouse on a cold January day without enough motivating daylight. To win, she apparently thought, she needed to get her ones and twos off their duffs and to the polls. I don't blame her from thinking that; I did too.

How do you deal with a strategy whose assumptions prove false? You have to keep taking data, and Coakley didn't. Contrary to post mortem claims, they had money to keep polling. They just chose to spend it on media.

After you've taken data, you have to be prepared and willing to change strategy. That's hard and messy, and people who still believe in the old strategy get bruised egos. So what.

More important than just polling the horse race, you have to poll who's going to show up. Sure, everyone models their view of the likely voters. Something happened in this election that obsoleted those models, and a nimble campaign would have been able to adjust from turning out the base to the real fight this turned into. The problem for Coakley was that the persuasion universe turned out to be much larger than she anticipated.

Coakley tried to improvise an effective field operation. Her campaign failed. In my area, her organizer simply wasn't up to the task, and he was a terrible listener, besides. It's not that unusual in the trenches to meet a twenty-something who thinks he knows your territory better than you do, but it really hurts when you're improvising.

Nearby, a friend reported that the campaign repeatedly failed to return his calls seeking to volunteer. I was able to help him help them, but most people don't have a friend who's tapped into the activist networks and email lists.

It turned out that all those hokey visibility events, where average people stand on street corners with signs waving to motorists, matter. They may not win any votes, but they keep votes from hemorrhaging away when the momentum shifts. They put a human face on the campaign, which otherwise is slick ads and disembodied and increasingly annoying voices on the phone. I previously wasn't sure of the worth of visibility events, but now I am. Standouts keep leaners from shifting. Coakley didn't do standouts.

The same logic works for lawn signs. Neighbors influence each other. Coakley never effectively delivered lawn signs and didn't seek locations.

As a bonus, signs and visibilities are cheap and easily delegated.

On the up side, saturation phone calls and ads did drive turnout. Whether they drove positive votes is another question. Both campaigns used them intensively. Both would again.

It's hard to research races that are close enough to matter. I'd like to know when phoning reaches the point of diminishing returns. My ear tells me it was the Saturday before the election, but it would take a very brave campaign to turn off its GOTV phone banks that early, even in a few test precincts.

And, of course, no matter what your lead in the polls, you can't take any time off the campaign. OK, Christmas day. Maybe.

Never out of date

Even though in 1996 Bill Clinton triangulated drastic welfare reform to the delight of Republicans, attacks on shiftless lazy leeches stray dawgs are far too appealing to Republicans and their ignoramus constituents to ever let go of them.

And damn if America doesn't spend trillions of dollars a year on foreign aid when we can't even pay our own bills at home...

There are people who believe both these canards.

Family of man

Forty-some years after the integration of American schools, the same racist dynamic can still play out. Only this time, African-American teenagers have beaten minority Asians.

When whites attacked blacks in Little Rock and Memphis and Boston, that was a hate crime (even though the legal definition didn't exist then). When blacks (or anyone, for that matter) orchestrate attacks on Chinese and Vietnamese in Philadelphia, it's a hate crime again.

Time and again, when an out group gets in, it forgets the moral lessons of its own oppression and learns only the tribal lesson that the in group can oppress the out group. The ugliness is part of who we are. But just part of us.

Just glad to see me

Click image to see full Matt Davies/Journal News cartoon.

Corporate orgasm

Click image for full Nate Beeler/Washington Examiner cartoon.

Terrorist

The slaying of Dr. George Tiller was an act of political terrorism, intended to strike fear into doctors willing to perform abortions. Why hasn't Scott Roeder been charged under federal terrorism statutes?

Pity the poor corporation

The Supremes say 5-4 that there's nowhere near enough corporate ownership of government:

[Justice Anthony] Kennedy’s majority opinion said the flow of information to citizens should not be restricted.

If by information you mean disinfotainment...

Never mind how much actual legislation is written by corporate lobbyists. The late health care bill? Now that the Republicans hold 41 Senate seats, there are going to be some lobbyists looking to keep some of its corporate welfare. In a bill with none of those pesky provisions that actually help people.

Never mind that corporations always find a dodge or a loophole or an astroturf group to launder their political money. Just ask Newt Gingrich and Tom Delay, each in his own way an apostle of creative financing of reactionary politics. Just think back, oh, a few days, to the thinly disguised insurance companies calling on behalf of Scott Brown.

Never mind that we already have two pro-corporate political parties, not even counting the libertarians, who, with all the enjoyable things in the world, get most aroused by business. Mildly, the way the Democrats do everything, they favor corporations: Some of my best friends are corporations. Corporations are such nice legal persons, and they contribute to my campaign fund! In character as well, Republicans back corporations wildly as the pinnacle of human perfection. Do Dems like corporations? Then Republicans love corporations infinity times infinity. No tag-backs! (Whatever...) An incorporated church? Ahh, they came in their pants a little.

Never mind that the Supremes, in their infinite ... whoredom, left intact contribution limits from actual living people on the logic of this breathtaking piece of self-service colonoscopy:

[T]he justices adhered to previous rulings that there is a more significant “quid pro quo’’ attached to such direct contribution to a candi date [sic]...

Can I pause just a minute to state the clear fact that would be obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together? Every single corporate political act EVER was intended to elicit a self-interested result. At least a few contributions from breathing people don't want anything beyond the best effort and good conscience of the recipient.

Never mind that we taxpayers have bailed out banks and other corporations and continued to pay corporate titans obscene salaries, and contrariwise that we've left underwater mortgage-payers and huge numbers of the unemployed with stale, moldy bread crusts (and they should feel lucky to have those, dammit!).

Never mind that corporate disinfotainment is already pandemic. These people are well-practiced at lying. They know how to dress propaganda up in pretty words and pictures. They make some good products, but when they make dreck they'll still sell it to us, soft or hard, whatever it takes.

With apologies to Rousseau, men are born free, but they are everywhere in corporations.

Still, in the end, the only thing that can possibly save us - don't hold your breath - is for American to turn their bullshit detectors waaay up high and stop being such moronic credulous chumps.

Thank god it wasn't a Christian prayer

To those who aren't very cosmopolitan, Judeo-Christian is really Judeo-Christian. Orthodox? Isn't that something to do with Greeks? Hey, doesn't that patriarch look like Ayatollah Khomeini? Aaaieee!

A Republican wins, and we're back to living in fear! I'm kidding, but I really wish I knew this was a coincidence and not a symptom of America's reversion to reflexive panic.

Last call

Today, while working from home in the morning, I got yet another political robo-call. It came from the Massachusetts Citizens for Life, who quoted Pat Buchanan and declared how important it is to kill the health bill.

Then they got to their specific agenda: They wanted me to call Massachusetts Sec. of State Bill Galvin to get Scott Brown's win certified early.

I wonder, did that call make anyone as furious as the calls yesterday?

Housekeeping the anger

One thing that angry Republicans in Massachusetts should consider: When they were up in arms over the fact that the Democratic legislature and the governor changed the Senatorial succession law to allow an interim appointment by the governor, the Dems could easily have returned to the status quo before the previous change, which was meant to take a lasting appointment to fill John Kerry's seat out of Mitt Romney's hands.

That would have been bald partisanship (as well as undemocratic). But the Democrats didn't do that. Out of principle.

Tom Delay would never have been so democratic. Republicans should mull that over.

Land of opportunity

America, where every plutocrat can rework his (or her!) image to wear a flannel shirt, drive a good ol' pickup truck, and act real folksy - while the cameras are on, anyway.

The newsreader on WUMB this morning related Scott Brown's claim that the people of Massachusetts voted to end partisan gridlock in Washington. Huh!?

If so, they bought a pig in a poke, which wouldn't be surprising given their eagerness to buy into the obvious bullshit of political image-making. What they're going to get for their well-earned and better-fanned outrage is sand in the gears. And those gears weren't working very well already.

Win some, lose some

The dog still has to be walked, the driveway still has to be shovelled, the dishwasher still has to be loaded. And it is a beautiful night outside.

Most voters don't vote ideology. They vote for change when they hurt, and they vote for safety when they're afraid. Right now, they hurt.

Never mind who made them hurt. They don't analyze. Martha Coakley didn't give voters much to vote for, and they forgot the last time a handsome Republican fooled them into thinking he would keep their interests close.

And, sure enough, there at Scott Brown's victory party: Mitt Romney. The people of Massachusetts will soon start to learn for better or for worse about Brown's sincerity. I expect the worst.

Meanwhile, Brown captured a mandate. Killing the current health care bill - if he can get sworn in time - may actually do the Democrats a favor. It's not a very good bill.

Hating the phone

People hate political phone calls, especially in a competitive environment. The two hours that political calling might in an extreme case take out of their lives in any single election season is too big a price to pay for self-government. Watch the season opener of 24? Sure. Take thirty 4-minute phone calls? What an outrage!

People will tell you they don't like your call because they might be on the line when a call comes in to RSVP for a child's birthday party, but that's really just a lame excuse. Political calls seldom last more than a few minutes, and the very same people are often more than willing to give you down the road for calling them, and it can take a while to get all their frustrations off their chest.

Still, the truth is that people hate political calling. There is no doubt whatsoever that some voters will go to the polls for a spite vote against whoever's campaign called them the most. They will of course blame a campaign's allies (SEIU, OFA, DNC for Coakley; RNC and a host of dressed up health insurance companies for Brown), who can't legally coordinate their calling.

Campaigns need to figure out:

• how to eliminate duplication of calls - autodialers don't yet work any better for political calls than they do for selling timeshares
• when to stop calling because they've gone past even diminishing returns to the point at which they're actively alienating supporters
• how to bypass the phone altogether for channels that people will accept - no, mass media ads are not the answer; they're only a little better

Research needs to be done on different phoning strategies, but that requires a much more sophisticated operation than what now exists on the Democratic side. We need to pick well-modelled bellwether precincts and treat them differently to see which strategy gets the best results in turnout and margin of victory.

I've long thought that we need to push our organizing back down to the street level, back to old methods that rely on delivering the message through neighbors. It's a lot harder to tell someone you know to go to hell (well, not for one of my neighbors) than some stranger on the phone.

In the end, though, the phones and the saturation of media ads worked. We don't know here just before 7:00 p.m. whether they worked to increase either candidate's share of the vote, but we already know that they drove turnout to huge levels for a special election with only one race on the ballot on a snowy January day.