Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Broun instructs House on ‘proprer’ pledge technique

"There should not be a comma between ‘one nation’ and ‘under God,’” conservative Republican congressman Paul Broun instructed his colleagues on the floor of the House before beginning his rendition of a pause-free pledge Monday. Raw Story has more:

It may seem a minor issue, but some have argued that saying the pledge as Broun prefers—and as it was written when “under God” was inserted in 1954—implies a fealty to religion that is inappropriate in the US.

“Without a comma, the phrase indicates that the central characteristic of the United States as a political community is its subordination to God,” wrote history professor Matthew Dennis, after the Supreme Court rejected an attempt to strike “under God” as unconstitutional. “In short, the political community is defined by its religious charge. A pledge that states this becomes, in the words of the 9th Circuit, ‘impermissible government endorsement of religion,’ functioning to ‘enforce a religious orthodoxy of mono- theism.’”

The pledge had no reference to a diety until 1954, when Cold War fever saw its inclusion to separate Americans from “godless Communists.” The Supreme Court dismissed a case arguing that the phrase violated the First Amendment’s guarantees of freedom of religion because the plaintiff had no standing to argue the case, not because of any inherent legal justification for the phrase.

A Broun spokesman even said there should be no pause to emphasize there is “no separation or implied separation between nation and God.” So his House floor lesson may be more than just a penchant for details.

“As a Marine, clearly, he’s had to face a lot more difficult challenges than instructing Members of Congress on the proper way of saying the Pledge of Allegiance,” spokesman John Kennedy told Roll Call‘s Heard on the Hill column. “There is, in fact, no comma in that section. So correctly, it’s said, ‘One nation under [God],’ no separation or implied separation between nation and God.”

A first-term lawmaker from the northeastern corner of Georgia, Broun’s House floor admonition was not his only attempt to insert God further into American life. Last November, he supported a resolution honoring a group promoting the Ten Commandments.

“I commend the Ten Commandments Commission for their efforts to remind Americans that we are, in fact, ‘one nation under God,’” he said at the time.

Here’s theC-SPAN video:

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Health Insurance in America: Dying for Coverage

Facing South reports on a recently released report from Families USA, Dying for Coverage, finding that in all 50 states the number of uninsured and the estimated number of deaths is directly related to lack of health insurance:

A study by the Institute of Medicine, tha basis for the Family USA report, found that uninsured adults are 25 percent more likely to die prematurely than adults with private health insurance. Another academic study found that lack of health insurance is the third leading cause of death, following heart disease and cancer, for uninsured adults between the ages of 55 and 64.

While the percentage of uninsured, working age (25-64) people in the South reported by Families USA in 2006 (20.5%) is similar to overall U.S. percentage of uninsured in the same age group reported by the U.S. Census (19.9%), several Southern states have a significantly higher percentage of uninsured.

For example, the Families USA report found that Louisiana had the highest rate of uninsured among working people at 26.2%. Florida (25.3%), Arkansas (23.2%), and Mississippi (22.1%) also exceeded the regional and national rates. Virginia (15.1%) and West Virginia (16.5%) are well below the regional and national rates.

Other state reports from around the South on the percentage of uninsured working age people include Alabama (20.1%), Georgia (19.7%), Kentucky (19.0%), North Carolina (21.1%), South Carolina (19.7%), and Tennessee (18.3%).

The U.S. Census report shows that the South has the highest percentage of uninsured overall, 19.0%, as compared to 11.4% in the Midwest, 12.3% in the Northeast, and 17.9% in the West.

When you add it all up, there are nearly 8.5 million working age people in the South without health insurance. Even more disturbing, the Families USA report attributes nearly 52,000 premature deaths to lack of health insurance in these states between 2000 and 2006.

Meanwhile, in my ongoing war with SHPS, Ms. Quigley wrote me back summarizing my calls but said nothing about my $179 in reimbursement (not did she answer my question about making those calls available to me—like I expected she would???). It’s now 14 business days after providing the required documentation and I have not been reimbursed.

I’ll spare you the snippy email I sent in response. Flexible Spending Accounts are another Republican corporate welfare program masquerading as a healthcare tax benefit. SHPS is making money—my money! I’ve not gotten the benefit. It’s a scam!

Nudge: A Q&A with the authors

Steven Levitt has his doubts about behavioral economics, and cringed when Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein told him a year ago they were going to write an economics book about what they called “libertarian paternalism.”

But by the time he was half way through he was professing his love for the book, Nudge.

Today on the Freakonomics Blog theirs a Q&A with Sunstein and Thaler:

Q: You use the term “libertarian paternalism” to describe “nudges” that agents of change (or choice architects) can use (without using force or removing options) to influence people to make better choices while still preserving their freedom to choose.

What’s the most ingenious nudge you’ve found yourself influenced by? Are you as influenced by nudges as others are? What factors can make us more immune to nudges?

CASS: My most ingenious nudge is: automatic payment of bills. I used to pay late, a lot of the time, through sheer inertia. Now I do a lot better on that count. And sure, I am influenced by nudges, especially in the form of visible chocolate things in cafeteria lines and at airports.

The best inoculation against bad nudges is to stay away from them - to find some way to tie yourself to the mast. Ulysses was a good, early behavioral economist.

RICHARD: I spent a few months visiting the new business school at the University of California in San Diego this winter. When you approach the building from the parking lot, the first thing you reach is a staircase. The elevator is another 50 feet away. I used that nudge to encourage me to walk up the stairs to my fourth floor office. I am proud to say that I never once took the elevator, even if my backpack was heavy.

Jim Marshall: uncommitted superdelegate

What’s he waiting for?

Five of Georgia’s six superdelegates have committed to Obama. They are Sanford Bishop, District 2; Hank Johnson, District 4; John Lewis, District 5; John Barrow, District 12; and David Scott, District 13.

But Rep. Jim Marshall of Macon remains uncommitted.

“I am an uncommitted superdelegate who doesn’t feel too super,” Marshall said. “Nobody asked me whether or not I wanted to be one, and my plan is to just stay out of it and hope the others make the decision.”

Georgia went overwhelmingly for Obama, Jimmy Carter all but came out for Obama, and Rep. John Lewis poignantly, I’d say, heroically, switched from Clinton to Obama.

Maybe he’s waiting for Carter & Gore to step in and deliver the coup de grâce to Hillary.

YouTube bigger in video than Google is in search

So says Hitwise. Read/WriteWeb:

Traffic analysts Hitwise released new numbers today indicating that while online video sites as a category have seen a 7% drop in traffic year over year since March 2007 - YouTube has seen a remarkable 32% growth in visits during that period.  YouTube’s market share in the video sector is now at 73.18%, Hitwise reports.

That’s significantly higher than Google’s all-time market share high-point among search engines.  Google saw an all-time high 67% of searches performed in March, also according to Hitwise.

MySpace TV came in second place last month, with just over 9% of visits.  Google Video was 3rd at 4%, meaning that the two Google properties combine to hold a staggering 77% marketshare.  Hitwise numbers are limited to US internet users and in this case to 68 selected top video websites.

Meanwhile, shockingly, YouTube was NOT blamed for the teen web attack in which a Florida teen lured another into a home to be beaten specifically for a YouTube posting. The Associated Press was among those who were actually able to establish that YouTube was not the problem here.

Monday, April 14, 2008

An ode to elevators

The New Yorker has a major piece on elevators this week. Of all the things in the city to miss, I miss them:

In New York City, home to fifty-eight thousand elevators, there are eleven billion elevator trips a year-thirty million every day-and yet hardly more than two dozen passengers get banged up enough to seek medical attention. The Otis Elevator Company, the world’s oldest and biggest elevator manufacturer, claims that its products carry the equivalent of the world’s population every five days. As the world urbanizes-every year, in developing countries, sixty million people move into cities-the numbers will go up, and up and down.

Two things make tall buildings possible: the steel frame and the safety elevator. The elevator, underrated and overlooked, is to the city what paper is to reading and gunpowder is to war. Without the elevator, there would be no verticality, no density, and, without these, none of the urban advantages of energy efficiency, economic productivity, and cultural ferment. The population of the earth would ooze out over its surface, like an oil slick, and we would spend even more time stuck in traffic or on trains, traversing a vast carapace of concrete. And the elevator is energy-efficient-the counterweight does a great deal of the work, and the new systems these days regenerate electricity. The elevator is a hybrid, by design.

Did I say I miss ‘em? Elevators, we learn, are bo-ring!

Riding elevators, even when you are supposed to be paying attention, for the purpose of writing about them, is a pretty banal enterprise. So it was hard to focus on the matter at hand-not to just ride, expressionless and empty-brained, per usual, noting nothing, except that on the Captivate screen the word of the day was “sitzmark.” Otis has conducted research to find out whether people might better enjoy their time in elevators if it were more of an experience-if it would somehow help to emphasize that they’re in an elevator, hurtling up and down a shaft. Otis found, to little surprise, that people would rather be distracted from that fact. Even elevator music, designed to put passengers at ease, is now so closely associated with elevators that it is no longer widely used.

Georgia Supreme Court denies Troy Davis appeal

Not unexpected:

The Georgia Supreme Court on Monday again rejected a death row inmate’s request for a new trial, even though several witnesses who testified against the condemned man have recanted.

Troy Davis was convicted of gunning down a Savannah police officer in 1989.

In March, the state’s top court denied Davis a new trial by a 4-3 vote. On Monday, the justices rejected Davis’ appeal for them to reconsider that decision. The vote was again 4-3.

Writing for the majority, Justice Harold Melton said the new evidence was not enough to force a new trial. The court cannot disregard the jury’s original verdict, he wrote. [...]

Davis’ lawyers say several witnesses have recanted or contradicted their testimony that they saw Davis shoot 27-year-old Mark MacPhail or heard him confess to the shooting.

Three people who did not testify at trial have said in affidavits that another man confessed to killing the officer after Davis was convicted.

For more on the case visit TroyAnthonyDavis.org.

Burning Down the House

A friend here told me that the way to kill fire ants was to poor gasoline on them, light a match, and be done with it. He says that the chemicals we use to kill fire ants are bad for the environment and don’t work.

What do I know?

So yesterday I’m doing yard work. I take my can of gasoline, poor it on the ant hill, strike a match, toss it, and whoosh!

Now I have to tell you it has been many, many years since I put a match to gasoline. Somehow I was honestly thinking that the gasoline was going to soak into the ground and it wasn’t even going to light. Like I was going to have a problem lighting it.

Well, it lit alright. And I jumped right out of my skin! There was fire and there was smoke and I am just lucky I wasn’t fricasseed right along with those ants!

With the ants dead, I mowed the lawn and came on inside.

A couple hours later my nephew came home. And I do mean A COUPLE OF HOURS LATER. Maybe three? He comes in and I’m sitting here comfortably on the couch with the dogs working on the computer and my nephew says to me, “Uncle Joey, is the yard supposed to be on fire?”

THE YARD IS ON FIRE???

Now I have to tell you that we’re lucky there’s still a water shortage here in Georgia. It’s because of that water shortage that we have garbage cans full of collected water all over the yard.

We ran and collected those cans and dumped buckets and pales and we hosed and we got lucky. And I’m going back to Amdro I don’t care what anybody tells me!

Georgian recalls rooming with Michelle Obama at Princeton

The AJC tells the story:

Catherine Donnelly shopped at Kmart, settled into her dorm room and soaked up the Gothic stone buildings where, over the next four years, she would grow into her own woman.

But her first day at Princeton held a surprise, too. And Donnelly knew it would mean confronting the past.

The reason: One of her roommates was black.

“I told them we weren’t used to living with black people - Catherine is from the South,” Brown said. “They probably thought I was crazy.”

Today both Donnelly, an Atlanta attorney, and Brown, a retired schoolteacher living in the North Carolina mountains, look back at that time with regret. Like many Americans, they’ve built new perceptions of race on top of a foundation cracked by prejudices past - and present. Yet they rarely speak of the subject.

Barack Obama’s run for president changed that. When the Democratic senator from Illinois invited more dialogue on race last month, Donnelly and Brown, both lifetime Republicans, were ready.

But their willingness to talk isn’t a response to the candidate born to a white woman from Kansas and a black man from Kenya. It’s more about Obama’s wife, Michelle.

She’s that roommate from a quarter century ago.

READ ON. To entice you further I’ll add these two lines… “[Donnelly] came out that first semester, chopped off her hair and partied with other lesbians on campus. Soon she, too, learned what it feels like to be part of the ‘other’ group, to be seen as a student second.”

Sexual tales from my old Pennsatucky home

I was raised in Central PA. Ran away at 17. Remember that my nephew, who is gay, lives here now with Doug and me. Ironic that he had to leave the liberal Northeast and flee to the Old South to find loving support and family acceptance. My brother is, er, oh, never mind…

I’m going on about this because I just read about the Republican commissioner of Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, who had been accused of rape. By a man!

He denied it.

TPM Muckracker picks up the story from there:

On March 31st, police, investigating the allegation of rape by the 20-year old Marshall McCurdy, obtained a warrant to search Barclay’s home. They didn’t find evidence of rape. But they did find videotapes of hundreds of sexual encounters with men that Barclay had filmed on high-tech surveillance cameras.  The cameras were hidden inside AM/FM radios, motion detectors and intercom speaker systems, among other places.  There was also one at his business office.

None of the subjects were aware they were being filmed and no permission had been obtained, Barclay admitted.  According to a second warrant issued on April 9th, Barclay also admitted to hiring prostitutes on a weekly basis from the now-defunct website harrisburgfratboys.com.

On April 10th, the rape charges were dropped.  One of the videos found during the search showed Barclay and McCurdy engaging in apparently consensual sex.[...]

Sadly, his vindication was his undoing. Barclay was forced to resign.

And legally, Barclay’s not quite out of the woods yet-- he’s still facing possible charges for privacy violations and promoting prostitution. McCurdy, however, has been charged with making false reports to law enforcement authorities and unsworn falsifications to authorities. He’s up for a possible 3-year prison stint and $7,500 in fines.

Ah, just as I remember home.

Robin Morgan on “Goodbye to All That” 1 & 2

Ariel Levy talks with Robin Morgan about her “screed against sexism.” I’m an admirer of both. But then, I’m of the generation of lefties that would be.

With the first one, it took about six months for it to leach out across the country. With the Internet, it’s six minutes.” Morgan posted “Goodbye to All That (#2),” an essay about the misogyny directed at Hillary Clinton-Hillary nutcrackers, the “South Park” episode in which terrorists plant a bomb in Clinton’s vagina-on the Women’s Media Center Web site, on February 2nd, and since then it has been picked up by thousands of blogs, translated into six languages, reprinted in newspapers around the world, and, most famously, mass-forwarded by Chelsea Clinton. “For a while, I was getting eight hundred e-mails a day,” she said. She estimated that one out of every fifty is negative. “I was braced for much more opprobrium.”

After the piece in Rat, Morgan got death threats. “Because they said I was divisive-I was hurting the revolution,” she said. “There were even threats against my kid!” Her son, Blake Morgan, a musician, is now thirty-eight. His father, the poet Kenneth Pitchford, was an original member of the Gay Liberation Front and Morgan’s husband for twenty years. She was “Alice in Bloomsbury” then, living and swinging with Pitchford in a duplex over the Kiehl’s store on Third Avenue (the rent started at a hundred and fifty dollars a month), attending leftist literary parties with Susan Sontag, Allen Ginsberg, and Leonard Bernstein.

Famous people were nothing new to Morgan, who starred with Dick Van Patten on the television show “Mama” for seven years and, starting when she was four, had her own half-hour weekly radio program, “The Little Robin Morgan Show,” on WOR in the nineteen-forties. As she put it in her memoir, “Saturday’s Child” (2001), “It’s a rare little girl who gets to play with a doll of herself.” The Stork Club even named a drink for her: 7Up, grenadine, cherries, and a pineapple chunk. Once she joined the women’s movement, Morgan militantly opposed references to her child stardom. When she appeared on the “Tonight Show” in 1969 and Johnny Carson played clips from “Mama,” she walked off the stage.

These days, she is more concerned about offending people. “I always fall into the trap of thinking if I’d written it better, surely, surely they would have understood,” she said, referring to the young women who were upset by “Goodbye (#2).” ("Morgan’s essay is incredibly condescending,” one blogger wrote. “It completely fails to recognize that there are a variety of valid reasons younger women might decide to support Obama.") Morgan put a log on the fire with her good arm. “They think I’m telling them what to do, but they are investing me with an authority I never had. Why is that? Do you know why that is?”

Here are the essays. And the Wikipedia entry on Robin Morgan.

Sunday, April 13, 2008

WII Whiteboard

More on the technical perils of blogging

We’re always hearing about how empowered bloggers are, and I count myself among those who agree that it’s a wondrous world in which any of us can become a publisher. But the perils are many. It’s an either do-it-yourself or put yourself in the hands of huge corporations choice that bloggers face when they decide to set out.

I chose the former, wanting to learn how to design and build the blog, not just enter my content into someone else’s system. But that is an even more complex choice in which you must make a myriad of complex decisions, choose a blog platform, and still you are at the mercy of web hosting companies.

This morning I shared my nearly six months of struggle with a designer I had enlisted to help with my site. Later I ran across news from Blogs for Democracy that a regional ISP in Georgia has apparently failed without warning:

Sorry for the nonpolitical post, folks, but an area ISP that I (and thousands of others) use, Speedfactory (link is dead), has apparently ceased operations with no warning.  I’m taking the liberty of posting this info here, because with the exception of this web forum thread there seems to be no information available at all.  All that’s known from anecdotal reports is that everything has been down for two days, customer service calls are answered by an “all circuits busy” recording, and Speedfactory’s offices in the area are locked up with no sign of activity.  It’s conceivable that this will have an effect on some area web sites, so don’t be shocked if you notice some isolated outages for a couple of days while customers transfer their DSL and web hosting services.

It’s probably only a matter of time before the AJC, Clark Howard, and/or other media types bring you more in-depth reporting on this unfolding debacle, but in the meantime, you heard it here first.  (This post brought to you by Verizon mobile broadband while my DSL modem sits uselessly idle.)

Nothing yet reported in the news.

UPDATE: More from Blogs for Democracy. They say they’re still in business. But I’m thankful that I’m not their customer. 

The 6 year-old sex offender threat

Ok, the other day I was all riled up about NBC hyping the sex offender threat in nursing homes.

Now today comes word of the six year-old sex offender:

Randy Castro is in the first grade. But, at the ripe old age of 6, he’s been declared a sex offender by Potomac View Elementary School. He’s guilty of sexual harassment, and the incident report will remain on his record for the rest of his school days - and maybe beyond.

Maybe it’ll be one of those things that just keeps turning up on background checks forever and ever: Perhaps 34-year-old Randy Castro will apply for a job, and at his prospective employer’s computer up will pop his sexual-harasser status yet again. Or maybe he’ll be able to keep it hushed up until he’s 57 and runs for governor of Virginia, and suddenly his political career self-detonates when the sordid details of his Spitzeresque sexual pathologies are revealed.

Overlawyered provides a wealth of fannyswatter links:

“Attack of the preschool perverts”, syndicated/Orange County Register, Apr. 12; Brigid Schulte, “For Little Children, Grown-Up Labels As Sexual Harassers”, Washington Post, Apr. 3). A contrary view (letter to the editor from Cynthia Terrell of Takoma Park, Md., WaPo, Apr. 5): “The Post showed appalling insensitivity to the inappropriate nature of Randy Castro’s act. ...our culture remains largely indifferent to privacy and harassment issues involving gender.”

Saturday, April 12, 2008

Choice is a false god!

I’ve long complained about the tyranny of choice. For examples from just the past few years, see here, here, here, and here. My usual complaint is that more choice brings unhappiness and it takes up too much time.

As regular readers know well, I’m reading Dan Ariely’s excellent Predictably Irrational. It has a thing or two to say about choice. Yesterday John Tierney looked at some of it in a blog post titled The Price of Dithering:

The results are in from the Shapes Experiment, featuring a game in which Lab readers repeatedly chose between two shapes and scored points proportional to the area of the shape. Most of the players hurt their scores by spending too much agonizing over decisions that didn’t make much difference — and therein lies a lesson for making decisions in the real world, according to Dan Ariely, the researcher who ran the experiment.

Dr. Ariely, a cognitive psychologist who is a professor of behavioral economics at M.I.T., reports that the game was played more than 4,000 times by Lab readers. As they played, there were two basic situations they faced. Sometimes they had to choose between two shapes that quite similar in size — a difference in area of no more than 2 percent. Other times they had to choose between shapes that differed in area by 25 percent.

Since it was a timed game and you wanted to get through as many trials as possible, speed was of the essence. If you were going to spend time making a choice, it was better to to do it when there was a bigger payoff — when the shapes were dissimilar in size. But most Lab readers did just the reverse: 94 percent of the players spent more time on the similar choices than on the dissimilar choices. On the whole, they spent 64 percent of their time deciding between similar shapes, and only 36 percent of their time choosing between dissimilar shapes, Dr. Ariely reports.

“This means,” he says, “that almost everyone could have made more points if they were able to take the opportunity cost of time into account.” In real life, he says, people are even more prone to wasting time on trivial decisions because the options and consequences aren’t nearly as clear-cut as in that game.

We worship at the altar of choice and make bad costly decisions as a consequence. Buy this book!

RELATED: This reviewer from the San Francisco Chronicle is decidedly less enthusiastic about the book than I:

While Ariely’s stated goal is to understand the decision-making processes behind behavior ("yours, mine, and everybody else’s"), he may be overreaching in the applicability of his conclusions. “We all make the same types of mistakes over and over, because of the basic wiring of our brains,” he writes, but he presents no evidence of this causal relationship. It depends on his behavioral experiments being universal. The experiments he presents support the irrationality part of his argument, but I don’t buy the universal predictability of all their specific findings. While these experiments take place in California, New York, Massachusetts, North Carolina and so on, they rarely get off campus, and the experimental subjects (at least the ones he describes) are almost always university students.

That’s a specific demographic group that marketing analysts study closely and pitch their products to in ways that don’t work with other - especially older - consumers. Several of Ariely’s conclusions (the decisive role of image among peers when choosing food at a restaurant or the “irrational impulse to chase worthless options” in a game, for instance) could be quite different according to age or even income and social class. And that’s without even attempting to assess the experiment involving young men, Playboy magazines and a Saran Wrap-covered laptop.

And we wonder where violent kids come from

Gaming today:

The gaming site for parents, WhatTheyPlay.com, runs a “Question of the Day” poll that asks visitors to the site (i.e. mostly parents) a question that usually reveals something about people’s general attitudes towards games. Recently, the poll asked “As a parent, which would you find most offensive in a video game?” The results, as you can see to the right, found that more parents would be okay with cursing or even a severed head in video games over hetero-sex and “two men kissing.” Yep, horrific violence just ain’t so bad compared to two adult sharing a passionate moment together… a Norwegian gaming site decided to run the same poll. Their results were almost the exact opposite, with 65.8% of people saying they’d be most offended by a severed head.

Via John Davison (no “D") and Gay News Blog.

a BIG experiment…

...the Atlanta Ballet dances live with Big Boi. Performance end tomorrow. From the rehearsals:

AP Video. The NYTimes review:

At best, “big” has moments of fascinating intersection between the movement and the firecracker verbal delivery of Mr. Patton’s work. At worst, the dancers simply look like a rather sophisticated back-up troupe.

Alvin Ailey 2 will be in our town next week. At my age, more my speed.

We don’t need a conversation… Let’s debate!

Barack Obama’s speech on race in Philadelphia last month was said to be the beginning of a “national conversation” on the subject. I was among those saying it.

Conversation is all well and good but this ain’t it.

On Fresh Air a couple weeks ago linguist Geoff Nunberg wondered what, exactly, a “national conversation” is - and when we started talking about them:

The phrase is meant to conjure up that famous Norman Rockwell painting of a New England town meeting, where ordinary citizens gather as equals to hash over the affairs of the day.

Back in the 1930s George Gallup claimed that polling in the modern media had recreated those meetings on a national scale. As he put it, the nation is literally in one great room. Of course when you get that many people talking in one room, it’s hard to tell if everybody is paying attention. But by the time the phrase national conversation entered the language in the 1970s, the simulated public forum had become the model for a new bunch of media formats. Jimmy Carter staged the first ersatz town meeting in the 1976 presidential campaign, the format that later found its Pavarotti in Bill Clinton.

As it happens, that was also when Phil Donahue was pioneering tabloid talk TV and when Larry King launched the first national radio call-in show. There was something reassuring about the idea of everybody participating in a vast, extended conversation, particularly for a country trying to get past the angry divisions of Vietnam in the ‘60s. As the alternative therapies of the era were teaching us, no conflict was so rancorous that it couldn’t be dispelled by open conversation, so long as people were honest about expressing their real feelings.

True, we probably shouldn’t be calling these discussions conversations at all. A genuine conversation has no purpose. It’s about the pleasure of merely circulating. The philosopher Michael Oakeshott described conversation as an unrehearsed intellectual venture. It has no determined course; it does not have a conclusion. And it’s always a little disconcerting when somebody calls for a conversation about a specific topic. `We have to have a little conversation about all those calls to Toledo.’ It sounds like an appeal for an open exchange of views, but you know that most of the script has already been written. [...]

Actually, what’s usually most informative in all this is the debate about whether to have those conversations in the first place. If you really want to know what Americans think about race, punch “national conversation” and “Obama’ into Google News or one of the blog search engines. You’ll get an earful. And the subject being race, the tone often falls short of what you’d call conversational. If we ever did get to the point where we could really conduct a national conversation about race, we probably wouldn’t need to.

So I think I’m gong to stop calling for a conversation. I want a debate. And if there were to be a debate between, say, Pat & that angry black woman, I’m guessing she’d win.

Friday, April 11, 2008

Vote for Stephen Now!

If this isn’t reason enough for you, I’ll have a much fuller argument on Monday. In the meantime, trust me, join me, VOTE FOR STEPHEN!

Broun likes nukes & english

Athens Georgia Congressman Paul Broun’s been getting little news blurbs here, there, and everywhere all week as he’s built up steam for the introduction of his “English-only” bill.

Well today he gone and done it! Who better to quote for the occasion than the American Family News Network’s One News Now out of Tupelo, Mississippi:

Rookie Congressman Paul Broun (R-Georgia) has introduced the “English the Official Language Act of 2008,” which states that “no person has a right” to receive federal documents or services in languages other than English. The legislation is identical to a companion Senate measure sponsored by Senator Jim Inhofe (R-Oklahoma).

Although Senator John McCain (R-Arizona) and every major Democratic presidential candidate voiced opposition to the legislation last June during debates on CNN, Broun contends there is widespread support for the bill across the country.

As if that wasn’t enough of a good day’s work, today he released the following statement regarding the plans to build new nuclear generating units in Burke County, GA:

“I am pleased to hear the news of Georgia Power, Oglethorpe Power, MEAG, and Dalton with Westinghouse/The Shaw Group agreeing to build two new nuclear generating units at the Vogtle Electric Generating Plant near Augusta .

“While final review and certification will be performed by the Georgia Public Service Commission against competing bids for new electric generation, Georgia Power’s commitment to move ahead with this contract is good for the Tenth Congressional District and is good for the citizens of the state of Georgia.

“Nuclear power has operated safely in the United States for decades, and in Georgia since 1975, and now accounts for about 20 percent of our electric generation.

“Locally, this decision will be strong for our economy, adding needed jobs and spurring investment in our communities.  With Plant Vogtle already being a positive influence in our district, I welcome two new units – with new advanced AP1000 design technology – being added.

“This decision ensures that the energy needs of our growing state and district will continue to be met, and I applaud the decision to move forward.”

Meanwhile, AP is reporting:

Georgia Democrats have quietly assembled a group of five military veterans—including three fresh out of Iraq—to challenge Republican congressmen from around the state in November’s elections.

The candidates are criticizing the incumbents on domestic issues such as the sluggish economy, but they also say they have the moral authority to challenge their opponents for giving President Bush lockstep support on the five-year war in Iraq.

They are all long-shots, political newcomers in a conservative state that routinely elects Republicans. Bobby Saxon, 46, of Nicholson, GA, an Army veteran who served with the 3rd Infantry Division in Iraq and now runs a software consulting firm, is set to take on Broun.

I wish him well.

A Public Defender Visitors…

Click Here! Unavoidably, my link changed. Sorry for the inconvenience!

On Alan Abel’s sophisticated media criticism

It would be so wonderful if it turned out that yesterday’s Today Show nursing home predator problem segment was a hoax perpetrated as commentary on the shortcomings of our corporate media system, on the need for better funding and better policy around elder-care, and as a call for a more enlightened approach to the very serious problem of sex offenders in our society.

If Alan Abel had done it, that’s what it would be.

I fear that it was none of that. I fear that it was, instead, what passes today for serious journalism from “one of the world’s leading media and entertainment companies in the development, production, and marketing of entertainment, news, and information to a global audience.”

Garbage in. Garbage out.

Alan Abel is an American prankster, hoaxter, writer, mockumentary filmmaker, provocateur and, I would say, a very sophisticated media critic famous for several hoaxes that became media circuses. He and his daughter were interviewed for On The Media recently. This is his description of what the media looks for in a story:

Well, you’re looking for perversions and calamities. Really, you want obscene, offbeat stories.

Here’s Jenny talking about her documentary Abel Raises Cain:

Thursday, April 10, 2008

NBC on nursing home sexual predator problems

NBC’s today show had a “Consumer Alert” report this morning that had me screaming at the television set. It told the story of a Jacksonville, FL, woman who was raped by an 83-year-old man with a criminal record 20 pages long that included convictions for sexual assault and child molestation.

And so begins the sensational story of an epidemic apparent wave of sexual predators preying on nursing home residents:

MORALES: Elder rights advocate Wes Bledsoe says this is not an isolated case. He’s tracked more than 1600 registered sex offenders living in nursing homes across the country.

Mr. BLEDSOE: We’ve uncovered over 50 murders, rapes, sexual and physical assaults committed by criminal offenders while they were residing as residents in long-term care facilities.

MORALES: In 2006, this government report also raised concern. It found registered sex offenders living in nursing homes were considerably younger than the general nursing home population, making other residents attractive targets. Despite this, it found most homes do not impose different supervision or separation requirements on residents who are offenders.

Mr. BLEDSOE: Two questions remain: who’s next and when? Because when you put predators in with the prey, somebody’s going to get bit.

Now, I just want to say that I do sincerely sympathize with anyone victimized by a predator in a nursing home. But on its face this report is problematic.

Mr. Bledsoe’s numbers do not show an epidemic overwhelming problem. Out of 1,600 offenders in how many homes he comes up with a whopping 1 crime per state over an indeterminate period of time (the government report wasn’t tied to Bledsoe’s findings and apparently only raised “concerns"), and the assortment of crimes he sites varies widely (from murders and rapes—how many, who knows?—to physical assaults—how severe, who can say?).

For comparison purposes, how many cases of neglect do you image we might find in nursing homes? Or malnutrition? Or missed medication leading to serious, even deadly, complications? Or abuse of patients by staff? Do you want to bet it’s more than one per state???

But let’s go ahead and call the problem of sexual predators in nursing homes severe. Let’s call it heinous. What’s causing it?

Well, first we’ve got underfunded, understaffed, under-regulated nursing homes. And then I’d throw some blame at our star-spangled health-care system given that the geriatric set is not its favorite population.

Let’s move on to the sex offenders.

Our “brand-them-for-life, track-them-by-bracelet, or GPS, or any means necessary, and put in place residency restrictions that don’t allow them to live near schools, or day care centers, or bus stops, or churches, but by all means DON’T!!! TREAT!!! THEM!!!” approach means that they, of course, HAVE NO PLACE TO GO!!! So is it really, really, surprising that they are winding up in those under-funded, under-regulated, under-supervised nursing homes?

I don’t think the Iowa County Attorneys Association would find it surprising. Two years ago they put out a potent and important prosecutorial statement against sex offender residency restrictions saying that the broad sex offender residency restriction in place in Iowa then “does not provide the protection that was originally intended and that the cost of enforcing the requirement and the unintended effects on families of offenders warrant replacing the restriction with more effective protective measure.”

Even Georgia’s parole officers—not exactly the liberal elite—called for earlier parole for some sex offenses. That was quickly shot down. But these groups are seeing a problem and proposing a real fix, not just whipping up paranoia then pandering to it!

Back to the topic at hand…

The horror of stories like this is the distorting effect it has on public perception. I have no doubt that there are stories to be told here. But the one NBC is telling is so dramatically warped that I honestly had to wonder if it was an elaborate hoax. A bad joke. Of course, it wasn’t. It was a tragedy. Because the consequence of this story will be bad policy. Money spent in bad ways when there is so much real need.

For example, this is what the NBC report proposed as the solution to the nursing home predator problem:

MORALES: Now, [Wes Bledsoe has] rallied lawmakers in his home state of Oklahoma to introduce new legislation to create separate nursing home facilities for registered sex offenders.

That’s right. A whole separate system of nursing homes, just for sex offenders. And just exactly who is going to pay for that? And is that going to solve, or exacerbate, the problems described?

I’m sickened!

LATER: I have removed the word “epidemic” from my post. NBC didn’t use it, I don’t need to. Their report is incendiary; I was playing their same game. The change is intended to clean up my act.

Couric likely to leave CBS before contract is up

WSJ Online:

After two years of record-low ratings, both CBS News executives and people close to Katie Couric say that the “CBS Evening News” anchor is likely to leave the network well before her contract expires in 2011—possibly soon after the presidential inauguration early next year.

Ms. Couric isn’t even halfway through her five-year contract with CBS, which began in June 2006 and pays an annual salary of around $15 million. But CBS executives are under pressure to cut costs and improve ratings for the broadcast, which trails rival newscasts on ABC and NBC by wide margins.

The story speculates that Couric could replace Larry King on CNN. How pathetic! Now, I had very high hopes for her move to CBS. In fact, I saw it as an opportunity and kept quoting former ABC News producer Paul Friedman that they should completely reformat and rethink the show along the lines of the old Nightline:

Summarize the news of the day in five minutes or so; spend a big chunk of time-10 minutes or so-on covering one really good story; and give people even more to think about by ending with opinion.

I thought it could easily be ported out to other platforms and she could really become a new kind of evening news star.

Of course the format change never happened even as I kept quoting Friedman. But it turned out… Friedman was the executive in charge of the un-revamped same-old-stagnant-format CBS Evening News!!!

So Katie still gets crap for doing the crappy show that I sure as hell don’t watch while the guy who I was quoting calling for a revamp was overseeing the stagnation!

I have no idea who is heading up the show now but I have to hope that the notion of Katie taking Larry King’s CNN spot was some disgruntled production assistant gloating at how successfully they have duped the Wall Street Journal. Howard Kurtz puts the kibosh to that flight of fancy:

Couric had lunch earlier this year with CNN President Jon Klein, a former CBS executive, prompting speculation that he might be eyeing her as a potential successor to Larry King. But another source said the two are friends and that there are no plans to replace King, 74.

Kurtz has some more reasonable speculation:

If Couric is eased out as anchor, CBS plans to offer her either a syndicated talk show or a full-time role on “60 Minutes.” Otherwise, executives have signaled they would release her from her contract to seek a better deal elsewhere. [...]

CBS considers Couric, 51, a valuable franchise, whether she remains as anchor or not, but economics will be a factor. Network executives could not justify Couric’s $15 million annual salary through 2011 if her only role were at “60 Minutes,” and Couric has indicated she wants to ensure a successful launch if she assumes a new role, the sources said.

Whatever happens I think Couric a terrific talent and would like to see it put to good use somewhere. God knows it’s needed.

Via Romenesko.

Sally Kern: lying homophobe exposed

I think I have been fairly generous towards Sally Kern. Appalled at the outset as any self-respecting gay person would be, I thought her son made a decent case that his mother might come around one day.

While the meeting with Oklahoma PFLAG was hopeful, things turned sour quickly. From PFLAG’s National Blog:

Oklahoma Representative Sally Kern just doesn’t seem to learn:  Tape recorders are decidedly not her friend.

It’s been just over a week since the midwest’s favorite homophobe told her local paper, The Oklahoman, that PFLAG supporters from the state took her “statements and have spun them” to misrepresent her views on anti-gay job discrimination and her vow to at least consider an ongoing dialogue with us.  Her comments followed a meeting at the state capitol with Oklahoma City PFLAG president Rev. Loyce Newton-Edwards and two other local supporters.

PFLAG applauded Kern for agreeing to the sit-down . . . only to be on the receiving end of a mad Sally slap-down.  Kern and her supporters went so far as to refer to the three members of the clergy who took part in the meeting as “false prophets,” and attacked the credibility of our Oklahoma PFLAG families.  And even though we weighed in with our own fact-check of Sally’s allegations, she continued to insist that she did not say what she said.

So now it’s time to get out the audio player again.  Sally Kern, meet yourself on the YouTube.

That’s right.  Sally’s staff consented to having her meeting with PFLAG recorded, and her words speak for themselves. . . listen in as Sally pontificates on job discrimination . . . gay millionaires . . . lesbian golfers . . . and a little boy named “Jimmy.”

As the full 40-minute audio recording released this morning by PFLAG proves, Kern said not once (at about 15 minutes and 30 seconds in) that she does not believe GLBT people should be fired from their jobs . . . but she said it twice (again at about 33:15), confirming her stance when Rev. Kathy McCallie recaps the meeting near its end.  [...]

In fact, if you look at PFLAG’s characterization of the meeting last week, and Kern’s version of the encounter in the local press, there is no question that Sally flat-out lied to reporters. [...]

Kern also weighs in on “the homosexual agenda,” which, she explains, is a lot like a “to-do list.” And to-do lists are suddenly all the rage, for sure.  According to Kern, everyone has one these days, Jesus and Tim Gill included.

But perhaps Sally’s most poignant moment is one that exists only in her head.  Midway through the conversation, and clearly an hour or so before her next round of medication is due, Kern waxes philosophical on the awesome power of teachers . . . to convince our children they’re gay.

It is the story of little Jimmy, a theoretical Oklahoma school boy who leaves home one day, presumably heterosexual, and heads off to learn his ABCs.  But little Jimmy is unaware that his teacher has an entirely different “to-do list” for the day.

The teacher, Kern explains, lines the children up on the playground and begins to count off:  1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 . . . and then, abruptly, declares little Jimmy to be a little bit gay.

Yes, it’s all included - in five parts, kind of like the Star Wars saga - in the long awaited Sally Kern sequel.  Our lady of the perpetual audio tapes answers all of our burning questions.

Via PageOneQ.