Clarion Content

from David Horsey in the Los Angeles Times

Labels: 2012 presidential election, Politics

The Clarion Content is a dedicated and loyal follower of Nate Silver's statistical analysis of elections in his blog the 538.¹ Long time readers find great irony in this, because as a baseball analyst the Clarion Content's editor is likely to be the first one jumping up and down screaming if Mike Trout somehow steals Miguel Cabrerra's Most Valuable Player Award. Silver, the creator of PECOTA, is renown in baseball circles as a statistical guru only slightly below Bill James on pantheon.

Statistics aren't everything. Math isn't religion. It is a language, descriptive, but limited by its own conceits and structures.²

The problem is that the average moron in the media doesn't speak math. In 2008, Silver correctly predicted the Obama vs. McCain results in 49 of 50 states. He predicted every Senate race correctly. In 2010, he did pretty well too, nailing 36 out of 37 gubernatorial races, although missing on some individual House and Senate races.

This year, using his rigorous statistical analysis and as many polls as he can lay hands on, he has been predicting an Obama victory for some time. His model did show Romney making gains after the first debate, but it was from getting beat handily in the Electoral College to getting beat barely. In the weeks since, the model has drifted back up to an 86% chance of Obama winning, with the two most likely outcomes being the President gets 300 electoral votes, rated a 14% chance, and the President gets 330 electoral votes, rated a 17% chance.

Rocket scientists, like MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, laughably conflate polling and statistics to understand the President and Romney each have a 50% chance of winning. Ah, the dim.³

In fact, Silver predicts that Obama will win only 50.6% of the popular vote. But as those of you who are old enough to remember the 2000 Presidential Election know, the popular vote is not the deciding factor for presidential elections in the good ol' U.S. of A. We have this rigamorole known as the Electoral College.⁴

Silver has done the legwork and the math. He is convinced Obama is going to win. One reason he cited as an example on the 538, in twenty-two polls of swing states Friday, not national polls, individual state polls, Obama led in nineteen, two showed a tie and Romney led in one. This is not what one would call a dead heat, regardless of the national aggregate numbers.

Silver is not alone in his quantitative analysis, Deadspin notes, "the criminally underrated Princeton Election Consortium... [which] nailed the electoral vote count in 2004, and missed it in 2008 by just one... [forecasts] Obama's re-election chances at 98%."

Vote! The Clarion Content's article is not a reason, not to vote. It is about math and bias. Please, please, please go vote! North Carolina is going to be razor close for the distribution of its electoral college votes. There are also a bevy of important state races which will effect everything from schools and state taxes, to energy policy and the environment.⁵


Notes
¹The 538 sadly now belongs to the New York Times, meaning we can read it no more than ten times per month.
²Show us past the Godel theorem, "For every consistent formalization of arithmetic, there exist arithmetic truths that are not provable within that formal system." And furthermore, almost all statisticians concede, small sample sizes can yield lots of surprising results, often called "noise." See the Central Limit Theorem.
³Deadspin notes in its article about Silver, just like math class in high school, some of the bullies use Silver's ostensible nerdiness and high-pitched voice to accuse him of one of their greatest sins, homosexuality. Of course, if he is smart and effeminate, he must be queer. Ahhhh, the sophistication of the narrative that comes from certain parts of the Right Wing.
⁴Interestingly, one might wonder if this will bring the Republicans behind a proportional distribution of states' electoral college votes, rather the winner take all model used everywhere but Maine and Nebraska.
⁴The era of fracking in North Carolina is about to begin.

Labels: 2008 presidential election, 2012 presidential election, Politics, Predictions

The Clarion Content detests the foreign policy debate. It is the debate that feels most like both candidates are consistently posturing. In the other debates, one or the other side squirms, and offers the politically correct response, sidling toward the middle, saying what they think the country wants to hear, but differences are at least discernible. When the candidates start talking about American policy towards Egypt, Libya, Israel or China our head starts to spin around with self-propelled vitriol.

When CBS News continually ran this split screen during the foreign policy debate we couldn't resist the Robamney line, original credit to Storey Clayton and the Blue Pyramid.


Siamese twins? But hopefully not two sides of the same coin?

Our foreign policy cherry picking incorporates elements from to Chomsky and Ron Paul. The bottom-line is neither party has a coherent explanation for why America has sided with and continues to side with the dictators and the oppressors from Egypt to Pakistan. Political stability and its economic consequences are trump, time and again, regardless of which party rules the White House.

Nevertheless, elections matter. Supreme Court justices are selected, and henceforth, our own freedoms ride on these elections.

We overheard two middle-age joggers talking on the Al Buehler Cross-Country trail the other day as we passed them, caught just a bit of what one said to the other, "...only way to change it is to vote for Gary Johnson." The reply was immediate, "Well, you can't do that," and then, we had jogged by them.

A friend's Dad got so mad last week, he was sputtering that Michelle Obama wasn't born in this country.

We do not try to tell you who to vote for here at the Clarion Content. We might tell you whom we support and why.

We simply want you to vote.

We don't believe this election is necessarily the most important in ages or in our lifetime. We believe active and engaged citizenry is always important. It has an essential watchdog function that democracy needs. Power corrupts, voting is the first check on that power.

If you want to vote for Gary Johnson, Jill Stein,¹ Barack Obama, or Mitt Romney... just vote.

And vote up and down the ticket, here in North Carolina, you will be deciding everything from tax policy to fracking rules with your vote.

What do you want government to be? Get involved and decide.

Are you glass half-full or half-empty?

For the half-fullers, one of our buddies from California, he dreams of a Ron Paul Presidency accompanied with a Democratic Congress so that Paul can "gut the military, but can't touch social policy."

For the half-empty crew, as Churchill put, "Democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried thus far."


Notes
¹If you haven't heard of either of these two candidates, that is exactly what the two dominant parties are hoping.

Labels: 2012 presidential election, political quips-n-quotes, Politics

The script has been flipped on President Obama, and his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton is attempting to fall on the royal scepter to save the President.

Likely, you will hear soundbites about this drama in tonight's town hall debate.



This is the bizzaro world of modern political theater where blame must be securely affixed. Clinton made this statement to CNN yesterday,

"I take responsibility. I'm in charge of the State Department's 60,000-plus people all over the world -- 275 posts...The president and the vice president wouldn't be knowledgeable about specific decisions that are made by security professionals."

Rest assured this has only fed the bellies and the fury of the red meat eaters on Capital Hill. Four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens, were killed in the September attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi. They are now pawns on the table for political gamesmanship.

The jackals have the taste of blood and are in full attack mode, this despite the meme of the "I don't remember. I didn't know the details," being developed by their very own political godfather, Ronald Reagan, who's aides darn near copyrighted the strategy during the Iran-Contra affair.

The bitter irony for the President and the Secretary of State is that they are only reaping the blowback of King George the II's wars. Yet the narrative has been flipped on them. Libya was supposed to be near the epicenter of their successes.

The dictator, Moammar Gadhafi, is gone. The Arab Spring started right next door in Tunisia.¹

But the problem is Obama and Clinton missed the opportunity by cozying up to a strategy that said anonymous death from the skies is better than dialogue on the ground. Why was America with the generals and the dictators in Egypt?

Well, if you are asking about the origins of that policy, they are deeply rooted and haven't been ideologically divided along Red-Blue lines for decades. Obama simply kept running the program.² Political stability trumped human rights.

Now, the Muslim Brotherhood is in charge in Egypt and America's influence dwindles daily as the prospects for radicalization increase.

Libya's extremists and the failure of the West to be able to fiat political stability there, any better than it could in Iraq or Afghanistan,³ is ultimately what this is about and why the narrative has been turned on its head. Libya was supposed to reflect the utility, rather than the futility of limited power projection.

President Obama will surely need a better answer than, it's the Secretary of State's fault, should the question arise at tonight's debate.


Notes
¹How America can possibly still be on the wrong side of fight between the dictators and the people begging for freedom, fifty years after Vietnam, is a national debate we need to be having.
²As Mrs. Clinton would have if she had won the presidency.
³Or in Syria, where we are trying out a tacitly "non-interventionist" approach.

Labels: 2008's President, 2012 presidential election, Africa, Politics, war

Sometimes the old saws are true. A picture says 1,000 words.

Ladies, young and old, know what this election is about; here is the story, in pictures.


For real.




Simple, eloquent, obvious.



Speaking truth to power.




Our libertarian, small "c" conservative hearts are right with you. The government in a free society should have no legislative control over our bodies.

Labels: 2012 presidential election, photos, political quips-n-quotes, Politics

Does this guy bring enough of...

this to the table for Romney to win?

The Clarion Content agrees with the Washington Post that the 2012 Presidential Election winner will be the candidate that does a better job turning out the party base. It is ironic because President Obama's win in 2008 was carried by first time voters and folks who have not always voted in the past.

We agree with the Post that so much of the country already has their mind made up, be it, for or against Obama, that this means there are very few undecided voters for either campaign to win. The nation has been polarized since the middle of the Clinton presidency; and if anything it has been getting increasing polarized.

It is for precisely this reason that Mitt Romney's selection of Wisconsin Representative, Paul Ryan, as his Vice-Presidential nominee was so worrying.¹ Romney is a pantywaist who will say and do anything to win an election. He has been on both sides of the abortion debate, both sides of the gay marriage debate, both sides of the bank bailout, and enacted the law that Obama-care is based on, that he is now campaigning against.²

Ryan, on the other hand, is a red meat eater, who makes no bones about his intention to gut the government like a fish.³ While he isn't a Tea Partier, the budget he wrote reads like one. He is running the Barry Goldwater playbook that dictates the easiest way to decrease the size of the government is to starve it of funding.

Ryan may energize a conservative Republican base that has been, at best lukewarm, and at worst ready for insurrection, over the Romney nomination. Earlier in the campaign season, leading conservative voice,⁴ Bill Kristol, compared the Romney campaign to the trainwrecks led by Michael Dukakis in 1988, and John Kerry in 2004.

Can Ryan get the train back on the tracks?⁵


Notes
¹We did find it interesting that Ryan, perhaps seeing the writing on the wall, is also still running for his Wisconsin seat.

²We would never endorse such a soulless strawman. One reason we opposed King George the II from before he is first day in office, was he was far too vacuous to have any idea what policies he supported. The Clarion Content fears the strawman and the pawn far more than the true ideologue. The true ideologue can be opposed on policy and shown to be what he or she is. The shapeshifter, the moving target, or the puppet run by his handlers can be harder to fight. Note, all this is in reference to after the president is elected.

³Ironically, if he had the balls and the intellectual consistency to oppose the bloated military industrial complex the government is handing our tax dollars over to, the Clarion Content agrees with him in other places. For example, America must gradually raise the age requirements for Social Security. Medicare must be reformed. Government waste is massive and maddening (and greatest in the DOD). However, his opposition to Pell Grants and Food Stamps could be described as somewhere between short-sighted and cruel (especially, while supporting continued tax breaks for the very richest Americans).

⁴Kristol is far less influential with the average conservative voter than say Rush Limbaugh, but he is major power broker at 31337 level. He had the Dick's ear throughout the reign of King George the II.

⁵Our view has been unchanged for several months; while it might be close-ish in the popular vote, President Obama will win the electoral college comfortably. Of course, a European bank run, an act of terror or $4/gallon gasoline could change the equation. The coming shock to food prices won't kick in until Obama's second term.

Labels: 2012 presidential election, Economy, Politics

No pun intended.¹ Get your mind out of the gutter.

The Clarion Content, like our friends at the Blue Pyramid, has been frustrated with the level of discourse in the 2012 Presidential campaign. Ad hominem attacks have dominated. Despite some significant policy differences between the two major party candidates, the focus has been on personal and side issues, Romney's taxes and his dog, Obama Chicago cronies and his wife's fashion choices.



Neither candidate is willing to take responsibility for this continued debasing of American political discourse. The White House press corps, an inside baseball organization, if there ever was one, feels that part of this lack of substantial dialogue can be blamed on President Obama's predilection for seeking out softball interviews.

Politico notes, the last time the President gave a press conference, "Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes were together, and Lebron James had still not won an NBA Championship." Both King George the II and President Clinton had given more than twice as many press conferences by this point in the election cycle as Obama has.

However, as the White House press corps has noted, this isn't because President Obama refuses to talk to the media. Last week, President Obama spoke with Carlos, Kiki and Danny on KOB-FM, Big Ken and Colleen on Star 102.5, People magazine, and "Entertainment Tonight." He weighed on such heavy topics as his favorite work-out songs and his ideal super power.²

Inane? Perhaps. But even Republican strategists concede it may be effective. Politico quotes former George W. Bush spokesman, Trent Duffy, "I think just think it comes down to their overall strategy, which is to be low risk, to play it safe. They feel like they’re ahead and there’s no need to put the president in a position where he makes a mistake.

President Obama defended himself, telling ET, "What the American people hear and what the press corps want to focus on are two very different things."

His campaign spokesperson was equally blunt, "People get their news in many different ways. Sometimes it’s turning on ‘Entertainment Tonight’ and seeing what the latest news is out there."

So much for elevated discourse. Read the full story here.


Notes
¹Come on, have a little respect. Besides soft balls would be two words.

²He chose speaking any foreign language, although he noted, "the whole flying thing is pretty good."

Labels: 2012 presidential election, Politics

As our friend and political analyst Storey Clayton noted in these pages last month, "[our] society is manufacturing anger and despair at an incredible rate."

The pervading sense of helplessness among American youth, having been jaded by four years of more of the same pre-packaged as "change," is as great as it has ever been.

The centralization of power and the consolidation of wealth are going faster in America than they ever have previously. American youth can feel that lack of control.

Perhaps a few visual aids...





More on the illusion of choice and reality of the centralization of power and the consolidation of wealth...





That's nine companies controlling every brand shown in the diagram.



More on the illusion of choice and reality of the centralization of power and the consolidation of wealth...


"The four most complex U.S. financial holding companies -- JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America -- each contain more than 2,000 subsidiaries, with two of those controlling more than 3,000 subsidiaries, according to a research paper published this month by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Citigroup has 1,645. In 1991, just one firm exceeded 500 subsidiaries..."---source: Bloomberg News

Labels: 2012 presidential election, Economy, George Carlin, Politics, public protest, thought, war

Resident New Bruinswick philosopher, Storey Clayton, last seen in this space writing about the Occupy Movement faces the harsh realities of his reaction to the Colorado movie theater shooting. In a piece that challenges, provokes and doesn't apologize, he makes you think about modern society.

It is long, but well worth it. All links in the body inserted by author.---Ed.

Read more of Storey Clayton's work here at the Blue Pyramid. Check out the insights of his famous cartoon Duck and Cover, here on the Clarion Content. See and take the Blue Pyramid's legendary Book Poll here.




**************************************************


Object Lesson
by:Storey Clayton

I have learned a lot about myself in the past week. This is good. Learning is fun!

One of the things I have learned, or relearned perhaps, is how little I am surprised by things. Most people like surprises. I kind of miss them, I guess. Which is not intended as a way of tempting the fates. But if anything, I think I'm surprised that there aren't more mass-shootings in America. About one a day is probably what I'd expect. Maybe we'll get there soon. This is not a desire or a hope. It would be nice to have no mass-shootings in a year. But there would have to be a lot of changes to make that happen.

No, not increased security measures.

I wrote at length about the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon last October, how I saw it as a harbinger not of a revolutionary protest movement in our society, but as a reflection of how many people were left with nothing to do in our society. It would be nice if it were a revolutionary protest movement that was burgeoning in our society. Unfortunately, we have all seen too many revolutionary protest movements. We are watching several of them now! Look at Libya, Egypt, Syria. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. A bunch of people get themselves killed and do some killing and you end up with a society that looks a lot like it did before. But the leaders are slightly different and maybe this race or religion or sect has the advantages to lord over the prior victors. There is much to deter a young revolutionary in society today.

To believe in revolution, you have to believe in the future. You have to believe that there is a future worth fighting for. We are getting little stark illustrations all over the place that this is a foolish perspective. There will be a future, surely, in the sense of days that follow this one. No matter how much caves in or how much I lose, that is inevitably clear. But the idea that the right people can be in control, nay, that there even are right people, seems unlikely. And the more people who were raised and brought up to believe in an American dream and a future that was better than their parents' and the mass accumulation of growth and so on and awaken to find the piles of debt and futurelessness waiting for them, the more people they are likely to go out and shoot.

I probably shouldn't put in print that I understand that frustration and powerlessness of mass-shooters. I am a pacifist, of course, and abhor violence of all kinds, and am in no way trying to justify or vindicate the actions of James Holmes or anyone like him. But I get the idea of the world being so backwards and upside-down that only an absurdist and horrific reaction seems fair or justified. I have felt this way in my life sometimes and am very grateful to my pacifism for keeping me from stockpiling weapons. I know that some of you are probably surprised (there it is again!) to see me writing this, but I think you are not necessarily checking in with yourself sufficiently if so. Look inward, my friend. Have you never felt that kind of anger and despair?

This society is manufacturing anger and despair at an incredible rate right now. We've been over why, this worship of the magical "Economy", and we've even been over how it manifests when people only turn the proverbial gun on themselves, most recently. As my friend and debater Kurt Falk often tells me, I should be the entertainment at children's birthday parties. His idea for fixing all this is in his most recent post, where he joins Kurt Vonnegut (in Palm Sunday, just finished today, certainly influencing the style of this post) in advocating that we have new rites of passage for American youth, bar mitzvahs or quinceañeras for a culture unmoored. It's a good idea. It used to be that graduating from high school was our culture's adulthood commemoration ceremony. But now there is no real adulthood to be reached. In the sense of independence, of self-sufficiency, of freedom to make informed decisions, our newly minted adults are as bankrupt as someone with six figures of student loan debt. And just like those folks, they can't file it and start over.

So they shoot people, don't they? I guess that's a little oversimplified, but that looks to be the size of it. Apparently Mr. Holmes is walking down the corridors pretending to be the Joker or some other masked movie villain (get it?), but I'm sure he was perfectly sane when he spent meticulous hours buying guns on the Internet or laying tripwires across his apartment. He did the math. He was good at it. He realized that he had no future, that the people of America who were being distracted to death had no future, and he tried to illustrate that. All the way down to the six-month-old and the six-year-old who were apparently watching one of the most violent franchises in movie history after midnight.

I am not trying to glorify this scumbag or turn him into some sort of dark anti-hero (I'll leave that to Hollywood). But I am trying to dissent from the media chorus singing about the senseless unpredictable shock of all this. It's perfectly predictable and it has a kind of logic. Michael Moore did much the same treatment of Columbine in his masterpiece movie Bowling for Columbine, which we should all probably go rewatch. Part of his thesis was that kids growing up in the shadow of defense contracting, preached to about how the country they're supposed to love solves all its problems through violence, will occasionally take this environment seriously. And respond in kind. People are all agog about what's wrong with Colorado when Michael Moore already told you. To be fair, Holmes did hail from San Diego, one of the biggest military cities in the country aside from those found in Colorado. When we have a society filled with people who play a little video game attached to real drones that blow up real people, how shocked can we be that disgruntled broke teens or twenty-somethings from the new Lost Generation walk into a movie and emulate the solutions found on-screen and in real life?

What no one seems to realize is that you need to do something with these people. I don't mean to sound pejorative when I say "these people" - many of them are my closest friends and confidants. I coach them, I talk with them, I worry about the very concept of a future around them. They need things to do. They have active minds and have been raised on poisonous dreams about growth and accumulation. They need to put their mind to something other than disappointment, despair, and the soulless thresher we call "The Economy".

Many would suggest a war. I have no doubt that's one plan being hatched in the corporations funding the Obama/Romney campaign. A nice big war to sweep everyone into the old employer of last resort. You wouldn't even need a draft, you'd just have it de facto. I'm sure a land invasion of Iran or North Korea would keep many hundred-thousands of a Lost Generation occupied and out of the way. The legend is that this is what saved America from the Depression, what saved the Baby Boomers from totally overwhelming the system in the sixties. There's little doubt that part of the lack of enthusiasm to really make jobs and work for the youth of our society has to do with making the incredibly unappealing military look a little more enticing.

I, of course, would never suggest a war, any more than I would advocate you going down to your local movie theater and shooting up six-year-olds. They are the same thing. Only in a war, more six-year-olds die. Usually more horribly, more painfully.

I would suggest make-work programs. We certainly have things that need fixing. Let's build a free wireless Internet network for the whole nation. Yes, even rural North Dakota and Alaska. That would require some people, wouldn't it? Give them room and board and a college-like camaraderie, a little spending cash (so they can - gulp - see a movie), maybe access to a shared fleet of cars on weekends. Let's build some high-speed rails so we can take all these dangerous overpriced gas-guzzling trucks off the road. Let's build some solar and wind plants. I know, I know, it would require a total resignation from the very concept of The Economy. It would mean government was actively putting corporations out of work, and some of their employees too, and treating the youth of America with dignity and respect and like they're people who can do things. Heaven forbid.

But what are your alternatives? These people are going to be on the dole one way or the other. There aren't jobs, there aren't opportunities, and everyone in The Economy is doing their damnedest to make sure there are fewer jobs and fewer opportunities to come. I guess you can repeal minimum wage and make everyone punch each other in the nose for a scrap of bread you throw from the tower at midnight, but these people are increasingly going to leverage their debt and take matters into their own hands. And they'd have to believe in a future to make a revolution. If all they believe in is despair, then you get Aurora or Columbine or Virginia Tech. You get little dark knights everywhere, believing they are extolling some kind of neo-nihilism with every bullet, not realizing governments cornered that market with wars centuries ago.

I envisioned this post a long time before there was a movie theater shooting, and it was going to be about another kind of object lesson, back to the theme of learning about myself. It was about the fact that I bought a new coffee maker I didn't need a few months ago and haven't had the heart to set it up and replace the old one.

The old one looks like this:



I won it at the Yale tournament in the spring of 2002. They gave out useful or fun objects like rice cookers and Gameboys and coffee makers with the budget they would have spent on shiny trophies. I actually initially took the rice cooker at Emily's behest, but quickly swapped it for a more practical (for me) coffee maker with Steph Tatham, who'd won some lower award. The thing has worked perfectly for a decade. It's a relic of an American era of making machines that lasted, even though it didn't come from that era at all. I've probably had six-thousand or so cups of coffee out of this thing. It still worked perfectly this morning.

My intent was to replace it with this model that I got at Target for like twenty bucks:



It shouldn't take much imagination to see why I picked this out. The color is like the font of this page, the color I would pick for nearly all objects out of a pantheon of a thousand hues. It has a timer so that it will brew the coffee for me and have it ready when I blearily awaken at six in the morning to go to a tournament or fulfill some other wakeful task of existence. It is in every way perfect. Whereas the old one is dingy, off-white, wearing the stains of thousands of brews, incredibly simple in its design. It doesn't even have digital numbers! In an era where you can't dry your hands in public without interfacing with a motion-sensor, holding on to this thing is as old-fashioned as not having a cell-phone (I'm coming up on two years with a cell-phone!).

And yet I can't seem to make the transition, to get rid of the old thing. It was free. It has served me so loyally for so long. It still works.

I am such a bad capitalist.

Or maybe, to borrow a phrase, I'm just committed to commitment.

Maybe we just need to take everyone in the Lost Generation and have them paint our coffee makers. Have them fan out in the neighborhoods, house by house, and ask what everyone would like updated or changed or painted or retooled so that life feels new and fresh again. So that it feels like there's a future that's not just austerity and decline. So that people can feel like a rich person without actually being decadent or aspiring to buy and sell people.

That kind of house-by-house work sure beats the hell out of what that phrase is being used for in Afghanistan right now.

Labels: 2012 presidential election, Economy, Guest columns, Politics, public protest, thought

The Clarion Content subscribes to the 538's electoral forecasts. They indicate President Obama has a good chance of retaining his throne regardless of what happens in Appalachia. Nobody seriously believes Obama is going to pick up any states in region that he did not win in 2008. But a lot of folks are wondering what his unpopularity there means and where it comes from; the Clarion Content finds this an interesting question, because it is our view that there is bit of a microcosm brewing in the Appalachian tempest that may be a harbinger of some white behaviors to come in a country heading toward a majority brown skinned peoples.

Here are a couple of takes that stir the surface of the question.

The Economist examines why people who identify as Democrats voted against Obama in droves in the Appalachian region's presidential primaries.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, in the Atlantic, takes on the underlying dynamics behind trying to bracket off Obama's race from the "other" reasons he is opposed in Appalachia.

Labels: 2012 presidential election, facing race, Politics

This is what makes Rand Paul an interesting politician...

Kentucky Senator Rand Paul is a different breed of politician because he calls out realities blithely ignored by the talking heads on both sides of the aisle.

Agree or disagree with him on his litany of policy positions, he is a check on the Nation's Constitutional conscience.

Two examples in the last month:

Last week Congress introduced and proposed to vote on a six hundred page bill within the same forty-eight hours. The Senate voted 72-22 to waive the rule requiring a 48-hour layover for legislation to be digested. As Senator Paul put it, "For goodness sakes, this is a 600-page bill. I got it this morning."

Paul then proceeded to put his proverbial senatorial caja where his mouth was, proposing legislation that would force the Senate to give its members one day to read bills for every 20 pages they contain.

A reality check.

A week or two earlier Paul had called out his own party's candidate for imperial overreach when Mitt Romney dictatorially declared that he could unilaterally take the country to war with Iran, without the prior consent of Congress.¹ Senator Paul slapped him down,

"I must oppose the most recent statements made by Mitt Romney in which he says he, as president, could take us to war unilaterally with Iran, without any approval from Congress...This is a misreading of the role of the President and Congress in declaring war.

Unfortunately, Senator Paul is running even more of a solitary course² in this, than he is in actually expecting Senators to read the legislation they pass.

Click here for a fascinating analysis from Doug Mataconis on Outside the Beltway.

How much does Mataconis think Paul's opinion will shift Romney's stance?

Hint: "during the GOP primary fight the only candidates who deviated from the neo-conservative aggressiveness that Romney is demonstrating now were Ron Paul, Jon Huntsman, and Gary Johnson, and we know how the voters treated them..."


Notes

¹Our own reality check forces us to recognize Presidents have been ignoring this rule since at least the Kennedy administration.
²A pessimist would say perhaps only Kucinich, the Maxine Waters faction in House of Representatives and Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont would hold with Senator Paul when the chips were down.

Labels: 2012 presidential election, Ethically questionable, Politics

The Clarion Content has been following the fracking story and its effects on this area and our community closely. We broke the news that national builder D.R. Horton had been securing fracking rights to Durham properties through "Special Warranty Deeds." They have since backed down at least partially giving mineral rights back to some Durham property owners who were not properly informed they were granting them to the home builder.


This may or may not happen to your water after local fracking...

As we warned last month, the national debate on fracking is not over, many view fracking through the lens of domestic energy production. We think you will be hearing a lot more about fracking as the presidential campaign heats up.

The Obama administration announced this week its intention to toughen oversight of fracking on federal land. It is widely expected that the Interior Department will issue rules regulating hydraulic fracturing, e.g. fracking, by the end of this year.

Of course, a new President might mean a whole different set of rules than the current occupant of the White House is planning. For example, current regulations do not require energy and mining companies injecting high-pressure concoctions of water, chemicals and sand into the earth to even disclose what chemicals and potential pollutants are in their frothy brew (which may or may not seep into your ground water).

Read more about this political hot potato here at The Hill.

Labels: 2012 presidential election, ecology, energy policy, Politics

Today we bring you a special addition of the Clarion Content's periodic feature, Interesting links and Links of Interest. To see old Interesting Link posts click here and scroll down.

We find and you, the readers, submit good stuff that might not otherwise cross our radar.


Like Dutch here...telling us how he really feels.

First up, a piece from the site Real Clear Politics challenging whether or not liberals and Democrats are prepared to debate their positions this coming election season. The thesis is that they are so cocooned, so hostile and unwilling to give any merit to the other side's thoughts and beliefs that they are unable to muster winning arguments against them in the public forum. It is a fascinating take. It is the underlying premise as to why supreme strategists say, 'read your enemy's writings.'

Next, from the New York Times¹, is an evisceration of the myth that a businessman makes a good president for tough economic times. The examples for their argument may be a bit thin, almost anecdotal, referring to the Roosevelts, Eisenhower and Reagan as great non-businessman presidents, with Herbert Hoover and King George II serving as the examples of businessmen who made lousy presidents. The more compelling critique is their indictment of the foolishness spewing out of Mitt Romney's mouth,

I’d like to have a provision in the Constitution that in addition to the age of the president and the citizenship of the president and the birth place of the president being set by the Constitution, I’d like it also to say that the president has to spend at least three years working in business before he could become president of the United States.²

And you thought, Sarah Palin was a rocket scientist.

Our next article comes from the Economist. Two veteran political analysts, Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute and Thomas Mann of Brookings Institute, argue that partisan Congressional gridlock is even worse than it looks. They say that America’s political parties have become as vitriolic and vehemently adversarial as the parties are in a parliamentary system. Unfortunately while a parliamentary system allows the majority to rule, as the opposition waits and plots for the next election, America’s separation of powers hardly gives one party the power to rule unconstrained. The result is disastrous gridlock surrounding many, many real time problems.

In addition to the carping typical of so many political tomes, Mann and Ornstein do offer some solutions. Sadly, they are very pessimistic about the likely outcomes of the 2012 election. Quoting from the Economist,

They fear that the coming election will neither affirm the existing order nor accomplish sweeping change "in a way that will recreate a functional and legitimate political process". If President Obama is elected he may still be hobbled by a divided Congress, or one in which the Republicans have a majority in both chambers. Even if the Democrats recapture the House and hold the Senate, the Republican minority could continue to use filibusters and other measures to block the majority's business. And even if the Republicans captured the White House and both chambers and embarked on sweeping change, the changes "would come to a country that is deeply divided politically, and more than half of whose citizens would likely strongly oppose these moves."

Finally, a block of three interesting articles highlighting the strong anti-incumbent sentiment still prevalent in this election cycle. First from Fox News, the story of sixteen year Democrat Congressman, Sylvestre Reyes, who lost his primary race in southwest Texas. This second one is not a joke, or if it is, it is a bizarre and foreboding one. 41% of those who voted in the Democratic primary in West Virginia, selected a Texas prison inmate over President Obama. This was probably worse for the Obama re-election bid than "none of the above" giving the president a run for his money in the Kentucky primary. Keith Russell Judd, from his cell in Texarkana, Texas without any organized support, was simply not Obama.

The good news for the White House is that the Republicans are fielding a milquetoast weakling of a candidate. The even better news for President Obama, given the fever pitch of anti-incumbency; the Tea Party and Occupy are dormant not gone, is no viable third party or independent candidate has emerged. It felt to the Clarion Content like this was a year when a Michael Bloomberg or Simon Cowell (jk) could have grabbed the baton and made things interesting. Americans Elect, who spent the last several years organizing and attempting to draft an independent candidate, admitted last month that their efforts have come to naught. No candidate cleared the threshold of required support, not even the darling of rabblerousers everywhere, Ron Paul.

What does this all mean, dear readers? Well you know we are lousy at the predictions business, so we won't hazard a guess at the election's outcome, but we do think voters will be choosing between two choices they are not thrilled by, and turnout will be much lower than in the last presidential election.


Notes
¹Occasionally worthy, though you won't see us going over that pay wall.
²Yes, we believe he was serious, not kidding.

Labels: 2008 presidential election, 2012 presidential election, interesting links, political quips-n-quotes, Politics, Predictions

When the Clarion Content's editorial offices were in San Francisco, one new piece of slang verbiage that was increasing popular was "sketchy." In the late 90's sketchy's meaning had been modified to refer to something shady or unsavory. The word had morphed from our youthful understanding of it as unfinished or incomplete to a much darker cloud of meaning.

Sketchy situations were to be avoided. People who appeared to be trouble or bring trouble were referred to as "sketch." As in, "Watch out for that dude, he's sketch."





A situation that was extremely ugly or clearly bad news was often tagged with a superlatively construction, "Etch A Sketchy," meaning supremely sketchy.

So it was with personal amusement, as well as societally, that we laughed along with those who mocked Mitt Romney's campaign for saying that the move from the G.O.P. primaries to the general election was "...almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all over again."

The truth has slipped out!

How sketchy!

You are not supposed to reveal the shape-shifting nature of your candidate that openly and plainly. They will argue, everybody does it. It being, tack one direction for the party's primaries, and tack back the other direction for the general election. They will tell you, dear readers, it is common place. And maybe so, the Clarion Content would hardly argue that today's politicians aren't a sketchy bunch, maneuvering and crafting their message to their immediate audience.

The interesting element to this story is two-fold, one, that Romney's closest adviser, Eric Fehrnstrom, put it out there. As we said, it is amazingly indiscreet, an open secret that you just don't say, especially about your boss.

And two, we find it fascinating that this is the core of the criticism a hard right candidate might make against Romney. He is a position shifter. The evidence of it is litany.¹ It is the stick a Palin or a Bachmann might have used to bludgeon Governor Romney. He was the primogenitor of "ObamaCare," now he is running against it. His 2002 Gubernatorial campaign website said he would support the strict enforcement of gun laws and recognition of domestic partnership for same-sex couples. One doesn't win Republican presidential primaries talking like that, ask Jon Huntsman. Political guru Nate Silver, over at the 538, wonders why Republican primary challengers haven't used this line of attack more successfully on Romney.

The Clarion Content agrees, the man has no core. And his own team found the perfect metaphor. When we once would have referred to Romney as slippery, hard to pin down, constantly flopping around; sketchy is much evocative of the reality. Romney is not simply a flip-flopper, he is an impermanent outline, not a line drawn in the sand, but sand blowing in the wind, positionless, ever shifting, ephemeral, willing to simply shake the board and start over with the next set of hollow promises and platitudes.²



Notes
¹Ironically, it does not help President Obama much as a campaign tactic, because Romney's position shifting generally pushes him towards the middle. Obama can't very well attack, Romney for flip-flopping on "ObamaCare" or generally moving leftward.

²Lucky for President Obama, with $4/gal gasoline and a closet full of his own empty promises, he needs to face a candidate this lousy to have a good chance at re-election.

Labels: 2012 presidential election, Language, Politics

If you haven't heard about the budget battle looming between the Republicans and their House Leader, Paul Ryan,¹ and the Democrats and the President, Barack Obama, get ready to.²



With the Great Recession drifting along, the economy sputtering, stagflation a reality and deflation a specter still looming, the Presidential race will be almost exclusively about the economy. And there is no starker way to delineate the contrasts between the Republicans and the Democrats than the priorities and concerns their respective budgets demonstrate.³

As Derek Thompson, a senior editor at The Atlantic, so eloquently puts it, "Budgets are statements of values. They tell us what our leaders think is important for the country." Thompson argues effectively that Representative Ryan's Republican budget is designed to cut the Federal government back in a manner that would have made Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater proud. Ryan's budget is lowers taxes on the rich and big corporations, while attempting recoup some of that revenue by reducing the complexity of the tax code. Further saving are found in repealing Obamacare and cutting Medicaid, along with shrinking non-defense discretionary spending.⁴

The Obama budget protects the President's massive health care program, along with Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). Unfortunately, certain elements read like pure fantasy, as Thompson puts it, "It pays for new infrastructure projects with 'savings from the Iraq war,' which... is a clever bit of parallel-universe budgeting, like me paying for a new suit with 'savings from not going to Atlantic City tomorrow'."

The President's budget also protects the 99%. Well at least 98% of them anyway, by excluding them from tax hikes specifically targeting the rich. Of course, as veteran observers of Washington and the tax code know, the uber-rich have armies of attorneys to help them minimize and evade their tax obligations.^5,6

Like most, the Clarion Content finds it far easier to complain about both these budget proposals, than to offer real tangible solutions. Here's to hoping the politicians can do better than they have been these last fifteen years.


Notes
¹If the Republicans somehow end up with a brokered convention, this is the man most likely to come off the back benches and grab the nomination.

²Older readers, you will likely be as sick of this budget debate as you once were the phrase "Social Security lockbox" during the Bush II vs. Gore debacle of 2000.

³It is relevant to note this is, in part, because Barack Obamas's foreign policy has essentially been a continuation of the Bush II-Cheney regime's American exceptionalism justifies American overreach.

⁴Still waiting for the Air Force's first Bomber bake sale.

⁵Unless you believe the Caymans and the Bahamas are legitimate modern nation-states, not extra-judicial tax havens that would be far easier to invade and conquer than Iraq or Afghanistan.

⁶Plenty of evidence suggests increased tax code complexity actually makes it easier for the rich to avoid paying their tax obligations.

Labels: 2012 presidential election, Economy, Politics

S S D D

Just in case you were under the mistaken impression Barack Obama represented some kind of change from King George the II, read his Attorney General Eric Holder's defense of the Presidential right to assassinate U.S. citizens here¹ in the L.A. Times.

This will escalate. Inevitably.

It will function much as Bill Clinton's assertions about the right of the President to keep certain things secret despite subpoenas (after all it was only a bj²) which led to Bush II's determination that he and the Dick could keep secret the non-evidence they had to justify attacking Iraq.³


Notes
¹ The reality is: The administration is asserting the authority to kill any American whom the president declares to be an enemy of the state. So sayeth Jameel Jaffer, a national security attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Clarion Content's editor-in-chief agrees with them hippies on this one.

²The man did have a complaint insofar as they started out investigating an Arkansas real estate deal that began before his first term and just kept extending their efforts and the scope of the investigation until they caught him getting head in the Oval Office six and half years later.

³At a cost, so far, to America's citizens and future generations of $3 trillion dollars plus, $4 per gallon gasoline, and a cratering world economy.

Labels: 2008's President, 2012 presidential election, constitutional issues, Ethically questionable, Politics

In this brief video, Harvard Professor Lawrence Lessing explains how we, the People, have lost control of our supposedly representative democracy. And what we might do about it...

As Lessing points out, if there is one thing the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street agree about, it is the pervasive and pernicious presence of systemic corruption.

Labels: 2012 presidential election, corruption, economics, Politics

The Occupy movement has lost momentum in many places, but it is still burbling beneath the surface. The election cycle and the economy are feeding energy into the cultural stew.



Immortal Technique

Thanks to one of our L.A. readers for sending this clip our way.

Labels: 2012 presidential election, Politics, public protest

The Republicans are still stewing over who the candidate they want to coalesce behind this Fall might be. The two front-runners went at again in Arizona last night, Santorum v. Romney was punctuated with an occasional blast from Ron Paul and the cipher rapidly fading into irrelevance known as Newt Gingrich.

There were no clear winners of last night's debate. And President Obama continues to lead them all in polls of hypothetical match-ups, although the prospects of any incumbent with $4 per gallon gasoline look awfully dim from the Clarion Content's editorial offices.

Another Republican party bigwig, former party chairperson, Haley Barbour, spoke out about the likelihood of the race going all the way to the convention in Tampa Bay. Barbour premised his remarks on the lack of conservative credentials for ostensible front-runner Governor Romney. ABC News quoted Barbour, "In our primaries the more conservative candidates have an advantage. Doesn’t mean they always win. But that is just a fact and I think Romney is showing himself to be moderately conservative. We still have a long way to go with three candidates who are to the right of Romney."

Labels: 2012 presidential election, Politics

For those of you, dear readers, who are following the ugly Betty contest that is the Republican Presidential nomination race, we wanted to weigh-in again.


Wet, lame and dangerous is how these three are perceived.¹

Do not believe for a moment that former Pennsylvania Senator, Rick Santorum, is going to win the nomination.²

When pigs fly!

The triple loss by bumbling frontrunner, former Massachusetts Governor, Mitt Romney, in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri signaled dissatisfaction with his milquetoast campaign rather than a surge for Santorum. This is a race that none of the above would be winning right now. More evidence for that argument appeared this week, when Romney barely eked out a win in Maine³ over Representative Ron Paul.

Santorum's wins and Ron Paul's close calls are signs of the Republican party's overall distaste for the field of candidates. And it is not just the party's elite that don't like the candidates, the rank file, especially Tea Partiers and Evangelicals, are not buying Rommey, who got so twisted up trying to claim the social conservative mantle last week, he ended up calling himself "severely conservative."

That's not exactly in the positive lexicon there, Governor! As many have pointed out "severely" is most often paired with words like "depressed," "ill," and "damaged."

Which would be far out, if the Governor had morphed into a teenage Valley girl. Instead, he, once again, simply sounded foolish. The Clarion Content continues to believe that this year offers the best chance of a brokered convention, and for a last minute candidate coming off the sidelines, that we have seen in generations.

The favorites to emerge, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan or the next Bush king, the lordly regent of the State of Florida, Jeb.

Keep your eyes peeled, if Governor Romney loses Michigan's primary, even the mainstream media's dunderheads will know the race is wide open.




Notes and Jibes
¹In that order, Santorum is all wet, Romney is lame, and Paul is...

²Santorum is simply too socially conservative to win a national election, and the party's elites know it.

³Maine, which we would say borders Governor Romney's home state, except that he is such a carpetbagger, it is hard to declare anywhere his home state, was a "bad" win by less than 200 votes over Paul. He is about to get whomped this week in Michigan where he grew up silver spoon in hand, scion to his father, the governor.

Labels: 2012 presidential election, Politics, Predictions