DR_K_'s Open Salon Blog

I Like Fascists in Local Government

Thu, 3 Sep 2009 21:09:58 -0400

So President Obama is a power hungry statist who intends to euthanize disabled children and grandmothers. I’m aware.

And Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett is proposing a “strongly anti-democratic” new initiative. But I’m not worried about him euthanizing grandmothers.

No. Because he’s saving grandmothers from domestic violence, in the street, on the weekend, during his vacation, in person.

But he is planning a different, equally nefarious power grab. Barrett and Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle are developing a plan for the mayor to appoint the school superintendent, the unelected position currently appointed by the school board.

If you need to catch your breath, please do so, and allow my Alderman, Tony Zielinski, to take over here for a moment:

“[T]aking away the right to vote, which is one of our most fundamental rights we have here as citizens is not something that should be on the table. There’s many people that lost their lives fighting for the rights that some people take for granted.”

That’s right. The mayor wants to take away the right our troops are fighting for in Afghanistan, the right for Milwaukee to have a 4.3% turnout in a School Board primary election.

Milwaukee Public Schools have the nation’s highest racial disparity in reading achievement. The system has declining enrollment and ongoing budget problems.

Mayors in other large cities, including New York, Boston, Chicago and Philadelphia have taken roles in public school governance. Those cities have claimed improved student performance and “significantly” rising test scores. No one seems to have an argument that mayoral control would make the school system worse, only that it will shut people out of the democratic process.

But taking away the right to vote for a school board will make the school system moreaccountable to voters.

This is why we don’t elect police officers, or teachers, or bailiffs. No, more elections don’t make everything better. As the number of offices to be filled increases, elections reach a point of diminishing returns, where the number of well-informed voters is so low that real accountability is removed from the job. So why not give responsibility for the school system to the most accountable local official?

If he wants to take responsibility for the success of Milwaukee Public Schools, that’s great. After all, the mayor is up for election every four years and that’s something most fascists don’t offer.

My student loan debt is a national emergency, I promise.

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 09:09:22 -0400

I don’t have anything to add to the debate over the financial bailout. And that’s my point here.

I’m not the Secretary of the Treasury, or the Speaker of the House, or the secretary of speaker of anything. So I don’t have the expertise or access to know whether our government buying all the toxic mortgage debt in the country is going to help anything. I’ve heard a logical case for it doing so, but am I getting the full picture?

So as long as we’re spending a lot of each other’s money on debt without really knowing what’s going on, allow me to scare you into paying off my student loans.

Because of my monthly multi-hundred dollar payments, my savings are suffering. I am unable to adequately invest in my future and that of my community. Ultimately, our country could experience a long and painful recession.

(my bills)

You have now way of knowing this, but we’re just going to have to trust each other.

The situation with the mortgage backed securities and to a lesser extent, my bills, is of course, remarkably like the prelude to our invasion of Iraq, where we were presidentially scared and nationalistically rallied. I was then thoroughly opposed to the invasion, because I don’t like shooting people, throwing bombs at them, or blowing them up. Did I know that Iraq was not stockpiling weapons of mass destruction or cooperating with al Qaeda? Of course not. All I had was my skepticism and gut reaction that invading Iraq was both a strategically and morally awful thing to do, a judgment that has become increasingly defensible.

I think the House members who rejected the bailout bill acted in a similar spirit as those who voted against authorization for the war. It violated their principles and it didn’t smell right.

Now, I’m not a fan of gut reactions in policy making, so with regard to the financial bailout, that’s the last thing I want our elected officials to do. But I have no reason to trust the Bush Administration when they try scaring the country into taking some dramatic action just as I have no reason to believe the Democrats in Congress are acting in the genuine best interest of the country instead of buying into the administration’s threats or into supposed political expediency.

So is a bailout the right thing to do? Well, whether it’s out of modesty or intellectual cowardice, I’m going to say I don’t know enough to know. And it’s a frustrating position to be in, one that would surely be less frustrating if I trusted our elected representatives, those with access to all the information they need, to make the right decision here.

In the meantime, I'll be forwarding them my statements.

Bring on the Zingers!

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 20:09:41 -0400

Friday begins the set of presidential debates, that quadrennial series of high-profile, low-standard television artifices, the final opportunities for our candidates to directly reach massive audiences.

A good article in the Atlantic this month reminded me that there were 47 primary season debates. That’s a hard number to believe, considering that I saw maybe five of those and I’m pretty into this stuff. And of those 42 debates that neither you, me, nor anyone watched, what was filtered into the national media the following day?

The things that made people look bad, or dishonest, or dumb.

The most discussed moments in presidential debates are not impressive answers, solid understanding of issues or points debated. No, it’s when candidates look bad. Like the Admiral seeming and being ridiculously unprepared and George H.W. Bush looking at his watch and Richard Nixon having a cold. The obvious corollary to this is candidates doing their best to make the other candidates look bad. And simply outsmarting them or having better positions is not nearly as effective in sound bite world as the well-crafted, funny and concise putdown.

The Zinger.

There are classics. Benson humiliating Quale. Reagan’s “there you go again”. Most recently we had Bush on Kerry: “the only thing consistent about my opponent's position is he's been inconsistent." They fit into the themes of the election and are the products of calculated quick thinking or more likely, careful planning.

So the lines for Friday are undoubtedly in production and a part of rehearsal sessions. What will they be?

The Republican’s comic gold on Obama’s experience as a community organizer doesn’t seem ripe for a wide audience. But surely McCain will make a crack about his own age while cutting down Obama for his. I’d put money on that one.

What would I like Obama to say that he won't? How about asking that McCain be connected to a polygraph machine.

Axelrod and I are open to suggestions.

A November 4th Surprise? Racism At The Polls

Sun, 21 Sep 2008 13:09:23 -0400

Think about this: It’s election day. Barack Obama has a one or two percentage point lead in national polls and similar leads in the key states, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin. You vote. I vote. Everyone votes. We go home and turn on our TV’s, maybe make some popcorn. And then the numbers start coming in. It’s McCain all over the place. The small leads have disappeared and every tie goes to McCain. He wins and we’re all so screwed.

“’Obama will need a clear pre-election poll lead over McCain to win; a tie isn’t going to do it for him, in all probability,’ said Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. ‘It’s naïve to expect that there won’t be some racial leakage on election day.’” (Fox News)

This is what we get, I guess, for nominating the candidate we wanted instead of the candidate who could win. And this time around, the candidate who could win actually could have won. Hillary Clinton had not only the political experience and political machine to demolish John McCain, but people were really excited about her.

Dissatisfaction with the President and his party are so high that the Democrats had the opportunity to win even by picking the right person instead of the best candidate, even if he’s black and his middle name sounds like a target for our next holy war.

I hate to say it, but it sure was risky.

So now here we are, 45 days out, and an AP/Yahoo poll shows that Obama’s support could be six points higher if he weren’t black. Just imagine his 50% to 44% lead in today’s Gallup tracking poll bumped by six points. There’s the big lead that the Democrats are supposed to have in this race.

And for all those who are too racist or ignorant to vote for a black man, there are many more who just need a little prodding. We’ve already seen Obama’s scary black minister and his Muslim faith (cognitive dissonance required) and his Kenyan family and his terrorist friends. What do the Republicans have in store for the next month and a half? Surely something, particularly as their desperation increases.

And then there’s the matter of those polls. Aside from those who outwardly won’t support him, there are those who pretend that they will or that they’re undecided. It’s called the Bradley Effect, named after a black gubernatorial candidate in California whose poll leads into election day disappeared at the polling stations.

The likelihood of that happening to this candidate is, I think, much lower. The Bradley election was over twenty-five years ago, since which many of those voters have died and many new ones have been born. Polling techniques and technology have advanced also in ways that should mitigate such a disparity. But it probably does exist to a degree. So will there be a horrible surprise?

There’s only one way to find out.

What would it take to have an issues-based election?

Sun, 21 Sep 2008 16:09:22 -0400

Really, I mean it.

I don’t want to have to argue about pig lipstick, or how close Russia is to Sarah Palin’s house, or which foreign country John McCain fundamentally misunderstood this week. I don’t want to argue about these things even though in these and many cases, my guy is right and their guy is wrong. I want to argue about why my guy is my guy in the first place. About the deep down to the core differences in philosophy and mindset between the candidates, about what they would do with their power, who they would help and who they would hurt.

But it is, I am told, silly season. That’s something I could bear, had I not been told that it was silly season months ago and months before that.

The reality is that it’s always silly season. And that’s a problem.

Many of us at OS would like to blame the Republican Party for the state of our national dialogue, but it is fair only to blame those willing to win at all costs, Republicans, Democrats or otherwise.

But beyond that still, why are fake outrage, ridicule and slander effective to the degree they are? No candidate, desperate and shameless as they may be, would use those tactics if they didn’t work. Because in a rational world, they would look desperate and shameless. What is it in our society that allows and encourages the election of our government to be reduced to base triviality?

The corporate media is a main culprit. But like any wild animal, they can hardly be blamed for their behavior. Corporations exist to make money. That is who they are and what they do; to have any higher goal would be to defraud their stockholders. So it should be no surprise that news coverage is driven by ratings and cost-effectiveness. Factors that make much coverage both awful and harmful.

The blame that the corporate media deserves can be given to those who work to remove the public interest requirements from broadcasting and to enable the disappearance of small media owners. Democracy simply can’t function without free, independent media.

But like the politicians who prey on the lazy and profit-driven media, why is media able to get away with this? Why don’t Americans turn off their TV’s and fold their newspapers?

Maybe it’s because we want our election coverage to look and act like TMZ. Somebody must read and watch this shit without irony or horror. There were plenty in attendance at the RNC yelling “drill, baby, drill” and laughing at Obama’s public service, with no regard for objective reality or for their own dignity. How many more of my fellow Americans just couldn’t get tickets for that show?

So again, what would it take to have an issues-based election?

My hope is that as the Internet opens near infinite knowledge to those with access, and our media landscape reshapes itself around it, our understanding of the world around us will improve (mine included). I hope that our public preference for truth and reason will develop and become clear and that we will one day have an election where debates are debates and issue ads are issue ads.

Or maybe the old man will win.