Ever since Egypt’s President Mubarak disabled the country’s internet on Thursday, net buzz about a U.S. “internet kill switch” bill has revived. The “Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act” was introduced last summer by Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins and would give the president the power to turn off critical systems in the event of a cyber attack on the U.S.
Like a lot of citizens I’ve had bi-partisanship and harmony in political discourse on my mind lately, so I took a browse around a couple of right-wing haunts this morning. I thought this surely must be one of those occasions when the political spectrum might bend itself into a cylinder and left and right libertarians could connect. I did see a little of what I wanted to see: comments like, “Well, for once I agree with the ACLU.” The American Civil Liberties Union and 23 other groups came out against the scheme in June. (Letter, .pdf file)
More frequent were remarks that dig in on the left-right stand-off. On Free Republic a commenter mentions that Susan Collins is a “full fledged socialist/marxist that sides with the enemy every time.” The crowd over there often seems to get more steamed up about RINOs than it does about Democrats.
Freepers in the thread are also kicking around the idea of getting into ham radio, which fits with the apocalyptic survivalist rhetoric about food stores, ammo hoarding and gold that you see in certain circles. Am I imagining things or is there often a hopeful, wistful tinge to worries about mass deprivation? If there is, I think I understand it a little; one of my kids loves post-apok fiction and movies, maybe as part of a yearning for a simpler world.
At Glenn Beck’s The Blaze site, the talk is scarier. I made a screen cap of this comment because you’d think it might come down once moderators show up for work.
Please remember a very basic truth, and utter constant in this world: “If you shoot a FEMA NAZI in the right place, with a U.S. Caliber .30 Bullet, that NAZI will fall over dead and won’t give you anymore trouble.”
WHEN, the FED-NAZIS do finally get their marching orders, they will face no less than 30 million rifles pointed at them from behind every blade of grass in this country. The “High Entertainment” will commence the very nano second that this Communist Monkey in the White House, or any other, shuts down the Internet, or makes any one of several other “Trigger” moves.
Blaze commenters are not quite sure what to make of making common cause with the ACLU. One comes right out and states that if the ACLU is against the bill, he is for it, while another is more open-minded, stating that if the ACLU is against it, he’s really against it.
On both sites, any accord between the liberty fighters and the liberties union is grudging. A freeper says the ACLU might be right but he feels sure it is unintentional! A Blaze commenter remarks that a broken clock is right twice a day.
Oh well.
(By the way, I never buy that argument that you can’t judge an issue by blog comments. Sure, you can’t hold a blogger responsible for the opinions of her commenters, but I think a scan of comments to gauge the sense of a sub-culture is every bit as legit as polling or focus groups and more scientific than “man on the street” interviews. Why else would Karl Rove follow so many people on Twitter. You gotta think he’s crunching that data somehow—and that social media sentiment analysis will play a big part in the 2012 presidential elections.
Update: In fact, the coming deluge of election coverage by blogs, reported yesterday in the NYTimes media section, could benefit from a smart analysis of net sentiment. Tech types could invent a whole new category of insight measurement to complete with old-fashioned polling. Product marketers already have a start on this. Instead, the political blog focus will be the horserace. “Great!” tweeted NYU J-school Prof Jay Rosen. (It was meant ironically.) It’s an opportunity for a web programmer/journalism partnership like Jay and Dave Winer talk about on their Rebooting the News podcast. You’d need a gifted web database type—somebody who can make APIs stand on their heads and who can fashion out-of-the-box queries to put Twitter’s simple smiley or frowny attitude switches to shame.)
Neat idea: Whitehouse.gov is hosting an “enhanced video” of the live State of the Union speech tonight. Charts and things, I gather.
I may try watching it that way, if only to distract me from watching the VP and speaker. Congress can re-seat itself, that’s fine, but what I really wish they would change is the camera angle or the presence of those two players immediately behind the president. I can never help but watch them deciding when to applaud, and when to really show approbation by standing up to applaud. Drives me nuts.
Is it a trend to work through politics in fiction? Take Andy Borowitz, whose fake essays amplify news events in the same way SNL skits reduce the real to the ridiculous. Willie Geist’s new book, American Freak Show, takes off on “what ifs.”
Then we have Nicolle Wallace processing some of her frustrations through fiction. (I started Eighteen Acres yesterday. She’s quite a smooth writer, and the story sounds like it will be interesting. I have a problem with her cliches, i.e. “She loved him to the very fibre of her being.”)
If you include non-print writing you might even throw David Simon’s The Wire and Treme into the category of working out political angst in fiction.
I think short print fiction could make a comeback and serve as useful propaganda at the same time. It might even help magazine finances to embrace it again, if they were bold enough to try something that conventional market wisdom says is passe. Think Dickens—whose novels were serialized in magazines—and the crowds at the New York harbor panting to learn from British passengers what became of Little Nell.
Plus, we may even need a bigger helping of fiction to make sense of the craziness out there. Why couldn’t Huffington Post host Sarah Palin fan fiction? Why couldn’t The Nation publish a short story today that “what ifs” the proceedings of an inevitable committee hearing to investigate the president’s birth—because a few of those extreme right-wingers could get committee chair appointments.
It’s already stranger than fiction out there, so why not?
Nice to see the old campaign-style Obama tonight at UW-Madison.
When he said “Change is gonna come,” I couldn’t help but think of Sam Cooke, including the “It’s been a long time coming” part. Which put things in perspective. Is 20 months a long time? Sure, for people who don’t have jobs. Is it enough time to deliver on all those hopes we had two years ago when we were caught up in the presidential campaign? Nope. Not nearly long enough to dig out from that terrible mess, not long enough to give up and even think about sympathizing with the crazed opposition.
I’ve been disappointed but I can’t sit out the election. Neither can you if you know what’s good for you and every other average American.
You know your base likes Elizabeth Warren. Right? I mean, a lot. Like, she’s a hero.
But it’s not only about politics, so I hope you will be able to find the strength to overrule any naysayers in your circle of counselors who seek to play more ball with interests who feel threatened by her. Won’t you do the right thing for all the regular folks who need her as our watchdog?
I hope the president isn’t listening to criticism of his vacation. Favorable comparisons against Bush’s long weeks of brush clearing at Crawford can’t be admitted by the Right because, after all, the Cape Cod vacation fits the “Obama as elitist dilettante” narrative. Until tomorrow. Then he might be a Chicago thug if that description would fuel the conflagration better in the circumstance.
Determined critics simply will not be pleased. Not if Obama swore off leisure time for the balance of his term. Heck, I don’t think some people would be mollified if we passed a law that required him to stay in the Oval Office 24 hours a day in a 4’ x 4’ cage sitting at a school desk.
Last week I mused about the president’s problem with big business and suggested that the administration make a bigger deal of help for small businesses.
A Chamber of Commerce spokesman in the piece talks about a “tsunami of regulation emanating from the administration.” With the financial crisis and the oil spill so fresh in everybody’s memory it is hard to imagine there is much of a demand for easing up on regulation, but who knows what they will be able to get people riled up about. You wouldn’t have thought there would be a market for fretting about the deficit either.
Then there’s taxes. Regulation and taxes is always the conservative mantra. I don’t buy the argument that raising the tax rate by a couple of percentage points discourages investment and the entrepreneurial spirit. Say your business is looking at a terrific opportunity that will require a $100,000 investment and you anticipate a gross return of 20 percent, $13,000 after taxes. Would a looming tax increase of 2 percent, meaning you would only see $12,600, make you do a total 180 on the great idea and say “Nope, forget it then. My spirit is broken.”
The Chamber is holding a jobs summit tomorrow.
I still think talking more about small business would be a smart move. There’s even a small business jobs bill in play right now but you don’t hear a thing about it.
At the end of the NPR story the reporter opines that reaching out to the business world would alienate liberal voters. I don’t think you would find a lot of libs having a problem with the president reaching out to small business.
I’m sorry to see the White House bending to the will of the Right and Center, and going on a campaign to insist that Obama is not anti-business. This PR initiative—along with his nod to the deficit hawks—seems like a form of Clinton’s famous triangulation strategy—observe and tally up opinion numbers to see which way the wind is blowing, then say you’re for that.
Afterthought: Or maybe, as Paul Krugman says, it’s not public polling that sways the strategy, it’s news reports.
Big business has run amok—big oil, big health, big banks, but he could make a distinction that might prove interesting. It would make sense to double down on efforts you don’t hear enough about to help smaller businesses and entrepreneurs, where the real innovation and job growth comes from. Pump that up and make a big deal of it because it’s fair and smart. As a bonus it takes an arrow out of the Republicans’ quiver because the GOP and the Chamber of Commerce like to trot out the plight of small business when they really are shilling for huge business. See where they stand if a tax incentive were rolled out that dramatically favored tiny businesses and phased it down to zero at the 25th percentile of annual revenues.
By the way, the beneficiaries of help for small businesses aren’t always the smiling mom and pop retail store owners you see pictured in GOP pollster PowerPoints. I think one definition of a small business is 500 employees or less, which could be represented by a slightly different photo: a sprawling three-story complex in your average office park.
That’s funny, and typical, and tells me something about myself, again. The socialist in Congress is the only commentator I’ve heard so far who tied the banks to the oil companies as I did this morning.
Nice how MSNBC now lets you clip a clip to show just the part you’re talking about. And nice how they expose their text promo in the embed code so you can strip it off if you can read plain HTML.
There is nothing new to us about this. Haven’t we just seen how the giant financial firms almost destroyed the American economy? Wasn’t it just a few weeks before this hideous Deepwater Horizon disaster that a devastating mine explosion in West Virginia — at a mine run by a company with its own hideous safety record — killed 29 coal miners and ripped the heart out of yet another hard-working local community?
BP’s recklessness is just the latest variation on a story we know by heart. The company’s heedless disregard of risk and lack of safeguards at Deepwater Horizon are all too reminiscent of the failures at Lehman Brothers, Citigroup and A.I.G., where the richly rewarded top executives often didn’t even understand the toxic financial products that would pollute and nearly topple the nation’s economy. BP’s reliance on bought-off politicians and lax, industry-captured regulators at the M.M.S. mirrors Wall Street’s cozy relationship with its indulgent overseers at the S.E.C., Federal Reserve and New York Fed — not to mention Massey Energy’s dependence on somnolent supervision from the Mine Safety and Health Administration.
I flatter myself that I think I understand the way Barack Obama must think.
People want to hear big indignant statements from him about the Gulf oil gusher because we’re indignant about it and we want him to represent us. But it’s posturing; we know that and he knows it. If he’s like me, he rolls his eyes when he encounters posturing by other people and he would rather not do the thing he scorns.
What he will do, because he’s expected to, is rail against the delay and fret about the damage. A better approach would be what Dan Froomkin suggests: seize the moment to talk about regulation, but not just about oil. He could chance it and be brave, generalize it—tying in mining and the banks, maybe even the Citizens United case, not minding what opponents might say about bashing business. It’s been building to this point since the Reagan years and now big business has run fully amuck.
I think I’ve finally exhausted myself with obsessing over outrages by the right wing. So much resentment poisons you, makes you bitter about everything. I still disagree with Republicans and especially its Tea Party wing, but I’m going to try not to let it run my life, try not to spend my mornings before leaving for work searching for something to be peeved about, try to avoid media outlets that make the divide their guiding principle. It might be a good pledge for a lot of us to take.
Fox and MSNBC shows: you might think about swearing off basing your story lineups on “Can you believe what they tried to pull off today?” Yes, even Rachel Maddow, who I think is great and with whom I almost always agree, aren’t you getting to be a more thoughtful flip side of Sarah Palin? Smiling through the jibes, cheerfully sniping, looking for outrages—hoping for them, even?
Newspaper columnists and bloggers: try talking as much about your own agendas as you do about the other team’s positions. I’d like to hear more about what the camps really stand for, less about what they’re against. Crazy when you have to learn about party positions by reading the other side.
I might not succeed. I’m going to find another channel; I’m outlining some fiction about a small-town conservative politician who has some redeeming qualities. The obsession started during the presidential campaign and it’s hard to break free. Probably a good thing, though, if we could…
But… but… but… Governor Palin says too much regulation caused the 2008 financial meltdown. And I think I need to believe her story, because… she’s just like me, and… socialism… and take our guns… and ivy league elitism… and… and… freedom!
I am sarah-palin-ignorant when it comes to the economy. So are most media talkers and politicians.
The talkers and politicians pretend to know; you can tell how hard they are trying to sound schooled and certain by the way they thrust out their chins. TV talkers have to sound confident if they want to be invited back to the show. Politicians have to sound confident if they hope to take advantage of the crisis so they can trot out longheld political ideologies and try to get them implemented. Both parties are doing this.
Few are admitting we’re through the looking glass now, and I’d like to see a little more of what the philosphers union was calling for in Hitchhikers: some admission that there are broad areas of doubt and uncertainty. I’d trust them all more.
The president and the treasury secretary are allowed one measure of over-confidence each, because it’s actually part of their job descriptions to boost consumer confidence—“only thing we have to fear is fear…” and all that rot.
Think about it. Even the real experts have to question whether it’s possible to predict the outcome of any given countermeasure when there’s no exact case study to draw from.
I picture the policymakers as engineers seated before a giant economy console. The main big fader in the center is the Federal Reserve interest rate control and it’s already been slid all the way to zero. They might as well just snap the knob off so they can concentrate on blindly fiddling with the other controls, see if one of them has some interesting effect one way or another.
I think that’s what’s happening, and I’d actually feel a little more confident if the experts would admit it. As for the cock-sure amateurs, I’ve resolved to chalk them up as trolls, especially those still holding on to deregulation after all that’s happened.
Afterthought:Jay Rosen said something on Bill Moyers’ show two weeks ago about how the media prides itself above all on savviness. Knowing the score is the currency of pundits and politicians, too, especially if it’s predictive. Watching everybody claiming to know What Will Work when it comes to the economy reminds me of everybody knowing for sure What Would Work concerning the surge in Iraq, too. Nobody really knew that either.
After that: Robert Reich doesn’t think anybody knows what to do either.
The Wall Street Journal columnist Steven Pearlstein tears into Wall Street, saying it refuses to be pleased until the government sends tractor trailers full of cash to their loading docks.
I think it is about time to stop watching the ticker as politicians are talking. We’re relying on it, thinking of it as that CNN audience pulsometer shown during campaign debates and it won’t do.
Full clip at MSNBC.com (If your patience will hold out past the 30-second ad. Why don’t advertisers see that the difference between a 10-second and a 30-second pre-roll is an eternity to an online video viewer?)
I am sarah-palin-ignorant when it comes to the economy. So are most media talkers and politicians.
