Pacific Views

Republican Brand

Gosh, the Republican brand certainly has taken a turn for the worse.

Representative Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, said, “We need to, No. 1, prove that we are listening to the American people, and, No. 2, show that we have a plan of action to respond to what they are telling us.”

They sure have done a great job of listening to the American people and acting on their concerns. Sort of like this. Or this. Or this. Or this.

It hasn't even been four full years since the Republicans and Rove crowed that they had buried the Democrats and liberals forever. The majority of Americans had been won by the Republican brand and conservative values. Remember this?

Today's WaPo has an article about Rove's victory and how he has moved the country from a 49-49 tie.

John Weaver, a strategist for Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) who ended a longtime feud with Rove this year when Bush sought McCain's help, said Rove has moved closer to the goal of creating a Republican majority not by seeking one big realigning election, but by recognizing that political change often is incremental and using every election to get a little bit closer.

"He gets three feet here, three feet there, constantly eroding the other side and grabbing turf," Weaver said. "He has proved his point that you can expand the base, and not just among white males, without drifting or modifying either language or policy. I'm not sure it would work with any other candidate, at any other time. But it worked, and he proved the skeptics wrong."

Rove's assessment is that the 2004 election pushed the country away from deadlock, where it had come to rest after the disputed election four years ago. "We now clearly are not the country that was 49-49," he said. "We're now at 51-48 and may be trending to 51-47. It is incremental but small, persistent change. We saw it in 2002, and we saw it again this year. . . . It tells me we may be seeing part of a rolling realignment."

Now tell me, who would buy a car from this used car salesman? Or from this guy? The Republican brand is collapsing because their fantasy is crashing into reality.

All the News That Fits—In 500 words or a Graphic

... by Walter Brasch

The editors of USA Today, as they do every day, had to decide what to make its “Cover Story.”

The death toll from the cyclone in Myanmar was approaching 25,000, with about almost a million homeless, and the ruling military junta was still refusing to accept foreign assistance.

A Pentagon report revealed that about 43,000 medically unfit troops were sent into combat.

In Philadelphia, six police officers were under investigation for beating suspects. And, in Russia a new president was inaugurated.

What the editors chose to dominate the front page was a three-column head photo of presidential daughter Jenna Bush and a story about her forthcoming non-public private wedding. The only reason USA Today didn’t run the story on its front pages Saturday and Sunday is because it doesn’t publish on weekends. But, just about every other news medium gave the wedding heavy play.

When USA Today debuted in 1982, it was a glitzy full color alternative to the average gray newspaper. Focused upon an audience of travelers, and primarily available at airports and hotels, the five day a week newspaper, then as now, had short, quick looks at the news. “Across the USA” is a series of one paragraph stories from every state, plus the territories, something to let the lonely traveler know his home state still exists. A color weather map informs travelers what to expect when they arrive at an airport a dozen states away. Extensive business stories target middle- and upper-management workers who don’t have the time to read that day’s Wall Street Journal.

With an emphasis on polls, USA Today tells us what we think. And what we think is divided into four equal parts—News, Lifestyle, Sports, and Money. Thus, news is one-fourth of the newspaper.

Ridiculed as McPaper, but read by about two million people a day, most of whom get their daily dose from vendor boxes that look like a TV on a stand, USA Today has set the agenda for almost every newspaper in the country. Following the USA Today model, local newspapers have splashed color and graphics on its pages. The stories are shorter, but not necessarily tighter. And, in an era of downsizing, in which publishers who don’t pull in 20 percent a year profits are often reassigned, there are fewer reporters, fewer in-depth stories, fewer and narrower pages, and a greater reliance upon wire service stories. But, celebrity-based stories and increased fluff—what editors wrongly believe the readers want—have taken over the front pages.

USA Today was never designed to replace the local newspaper, nor should it be a model for local newspapers. It has a niche, and serves that niche well. But, local newspapers have become USA Today clones. That’s why if USA Today places a celebrity wedding as its most important issue of the day, then it’s reasonable to believe that the clones also believe that 25,000 deaths can be relegated to the inside pages.

[Walter Brasch, professor of journalism at Bloomsburg University and president of the Pennsylvania Press Club, readily admits he reads USA Today and several other newspapers. His latest book is Sinking the Ship of State: The Presidency of George W. Bush, available through amazon.com. You may contact Brasch at brasch@bloomu.edu or through his website at: www.walterbrasch.com ]

Global Suicide Pact: Amish Takeover

Suicide (n) - The most preventable type of death.

This is the ongoing story of a species whose leaders had a death wish, and whose members at large mostly didn't.

To me, "sustainability" means a situation in which your descendants are able to confront their own problems, rather than the ones you exported to them. If people a hundred years from now are soberly engaged with phenomena we have no nouns and verbs for, I think that's a victory condition.

On the other hand, if they're thumbing through 1960s Small World paperbacks and saying "thank goodness we've finally managed to pare our lives back exclusively to soybeans and bamboo," well, that's not the end of the world, but it's about as appealing as a future global takeover by the Amish. Give me the computronium problems; at least I can get out of bed and not have to mimic every move my grandpa made. - Bruce Sterling

I am not going to survive in any apocalyptic dystopia. My vision's good, but my knees are dodgy and I can't function without coffee and a high protein diet. (Maybe I could move to Costa Rica and grow chickens in exchange for the sweet, sweet arabica ... Hmmm, if I get out before the travel costs become prohibitive ... What!? Sorry. Ahem.) You can see how this would make me not only opposed to immanentizing the eschaton, but to sailing on to a post/pre-industrial civilization of the sort envisioned by mid-last-century back to the land movements or perhaps, the creators of Mad Max.

(And yes, I'll grant you, there were entirely too many hyphens in that last paragraph. Just wait, though.)

So on that note, you can be certain that when I talk about preserving the environment, I have a deep, parallel interest in preserving civilization somewhat-as-we-know-it. Consider that I'm a big fan of the intertubes, artificial lighting and indoor plumbing, just for starters. Don't get me started on refrigeration. Though civilization just-as-we-know-it, sorry to break it to you, but it has to go. At once. Couldn't be soon enough, really. And go it will, whether we want it to or not.

What a lot of people think is that there are three choices. Just, as I wrote here in the comments, it's that these are our choices:

Quote of the Day

Charlie Pierce, resident cynic, puts it well:

More than anything else, the presidential election ongoing is -- or, as a right, ought to be -- about ending an era of complicity. There is no point anymore in blaming George Bush or the men he hired or the party he represented or the conservative movement that energized that party for what has happened to this country in the past seven years. They were all merely the vehicles through whom the fear and the lassitude and the neglect and the dry rot that had been afflicting the democratic structures for decades came to a dramatic and disastrous crescendo. The Bill of Rights had been rendered a nullity by degrees long before a passel of apparatchik hired lawyers found in its text enough gray space to allow a fecklessly incompetent president to command that torture be carried out in the country’s name. The war powers of the Congress had been deeded wholesale to the executive long before Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz and a passel of think-tank cowboys found within them the right of a fecklessly incompetent president to make war unilaterally on anyone, anywhere, forever. The war in Iraq is the powerful bastard child of the Iran-Contra scandal, which went unpunished.

The ownership of the people over their politics -- and, therefore, over their government -- had been placed in quitclaim long before the towers fell, and the president told the people to be just afraid enough to let him take them to war and just afraid enough to reelect him, but not to be so afraid that they stayed out of the malls.

It had been happening, bit by bit, over nearly forty years. Ronald Reagan sold the idea that “government” was something alien. The notion of a political commonwealth fell into a desuetude so profound that even Bill Clinton said, “The era of Big Government is over” and was cheered across the political spectrum, so that when an American city drowned and the president didn’t care enough to leave a birthday party, and the disgraced former luxury-horse executive who’d been placed in charge of disaster relief behaved pretty much the way a disgraced former luxury-horse executive could be expected to behave in that situation, it could not have come as any kind of surprise to anyone honest enough to have watched the country steadily abandon self-government over the previous four decades. The catastrophe that is the administration of George W. Bush is not unprecedented. It was merely inevitable. The people of the United States have been accessorial in the murder of their country.

Without some true accounting, how do we regain the country we once aspired to be? What should we be asking of our Democratic leaders?

The Nose Knows

Today I went shopping, and since I needed a lot of cheap fabric in long lengths, I went to The Great Satan WalMart to make my purchase. Besides, the hamsters like their food.

So off I went. First, the bad news for the economy -- both when I got there and when I was leaving, there was parking close to the store in the main lane that approaches the door. Uh oh.

But the odd experience was inside. In certain areas of the store, especially the shoe aisle, the air smelled so strongly of unpleasant chemicals that it was noticeable. No leather scent at all. No rubber like the old sneakers. No, this was some sort of nasty plastic stew that saturated the air.

When vinyl was first made, the smell of it was at least interesting. That is no longer true of the things used to make shoes.

My nose said the area was poisonous. I went away and did not take anything with me.

Global Suicide Pact: The Efficiency Trap

[I'm going to be gradually reposting this series, originally written for OpenLeft, in the order of their first appearance. But hey, I'm finally moved in to my new place (have my own bathroom again, woohoo!) and shouldn't be such an absentee blogger. Kissy the face, n]

Suicide (n) - The most preventable type of death.

This is the origin story of a species whose leaders had a death wish, and whose members at large mostly didn't.

What exactly is efficiency? You probably think about it in terms of hours worked to work product generated. In any science class, it usually means how much energy as applied to a system does useful work, as opposed to what's lost as heat. In biology, that general science definition gets applied to living things and what powers them, their food.

In every stage of food consumption, called a trophic level, about 90 percent of the energy consumed is lost.

At the first level, there are organisms like plants, also called primary producers, which take energy from the sun as food and harness that power to transform carbon dioxide gas into energy-rich sugars; the carbohydrates that are the base fuel for all other organic reactions. Primary producers are chemical factories that supply the base total amount of energy available to all the other chemical reactions needed to sustain life. At every successive level, animals who eat plants, then animals who eat animals who eat plants, about 90% of the remaining energy is lost. This doubtless seems very inefficient.

Unfortunately, everything you know about efficiency is based on a lie. It's a long story. Maybe it will help if you think of living things for the duration as machines powered by volatile chemicals, but here's why what we think we understand about efficiency is wrong, and dangerously so.

XKCD: Stove Ownership

For me, cheese omelettes. Damn.

People. People Who Don’t Need People

... by Walter Brasch

From a pool of about seven billion, those hard-working geniuses at People magazine have managed to find the hundred most beautiful people in the whole wide world. And—get ready for the surprise—almost every one of those beautiful people are rich American celebrities.

For almost two decades, People’s editors believe they have been given the divine right to anoint who they believe to be the most beautiful people on the planet. The ethnocentric celebrity-fawning People editors are so secure in their self-imposed knowledge that they don’t even tell us what criteria they used to make their determinations. Not even an “editor’s note,” common in most magazines.

For the first few years, People etched their version of reality into our minds by attaching cutesy capsulated biographies to full page color pictures of the most beautiful. This year, the writing is minimal, the design is almost to the level that a good college journalism or graphics arts student could create and, except for a few full page and two-page spreads, most pictures are no bigger than thumbnail size.

Leading off the 69-page special section is actress Kate Hudson. Advance stories about her selection appeared in just about every American newspaper and major website, all of which think stories about celebrities are more important than stories about the recession. Also on the list are Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus, Ashton Kutcher, and Norah Jones. The seven member cast of TV’s “Gossip Girl” made the list. “Onscreen,” People told us, “they are gorgeous, scheming, backstabbing high schoolers.” Just what America needs. More future business executives and politicians.

The first few years, when the magazine editors could find only 50 beautiful people, there was a fairly even split between men and women. This year, about 90 percent are women. Except for six athletes (three men and three women), the rest are actors, singers, dancers, and models.

Three years after the first list came out, People recognized the elderly. Of course, the elderly were Paul Newman, Faye Dunaway, and Barbara Babcock. This year, there’s a special two-page black-and-white spread deep in the magazine on pages 174–175 for 40 celebrities, 10 in each of the categories of 20s, 30s, 40, and 50s.