The Right Wingnuts love to rail against "Big Governement," but the fact is that when there are problems in this country, everyone looks immediately to Big Government to do something about it. A hurricane hits and everyone has their hand out to FEMA to fix their roof. The economy is bad and everyone expects the government to do something about it. The hypocrisy of the Wingnuts, evident in so many ways, is especially relevant here.
Poll: Southerners want federal help, fear for jobs
By The Associated Press
November 11, 2009, 6:29AM
COLUMBIA, S.C. -- A new poll shows Southerners are fretting about job loss and the economy and don't think the federal government is doing enough to address either.
The Winthrop Poll of 866 respondents in 11 Southern states found the economy was the top concern of four in 10 -- the same share of people who said they were concerned about losing their jobs.
Overall, the economy was the biggest worry for 39 percent of the Southerners, followed by health care and unemployment at 12 percent each. Meanwhile, 38 percent said they were somewhat concerned or very concerned about possibly losing their jobs during the next year.
"More than one in three employed persons worried about losing their job means a lot of people who will put off spending and investing and that will slow economic recovery on the whole," said Scott Huffmon, a political science professor who oversees the poll and runs Winthrop University's social and behavioral research lab.
The poll found abundant finger-pointing for the economic mess as nearly three-quarters of the respondents said banks and financial institutions took unnecessary risks and shouldered a "good amount" or "great deal" of the blame. The same percentage blamed economic problems on consumers for taking on too much debt and big businesses for poor management decisions.
Getting out of the nation's financial mess is something the government should take the lead on, the poll respondents overwhelmingly said.
Nearly 72 percent said they favored new government programs to create jobs. Meanwhile, 63 percent said the federal government needs to give aid to states in serious financial trouble. Those positions were strongest among Democrats and independents, while Republicans were narrowly opposed.
Nonetheless, nearly 58 percent of the Southerners polled said the current federal stimulus efforts were making things worse or having no effect.
Huffmon said that's a sign of ambivalence.
"People definitely feel it is the role of the government to step in during this crisis. However, they do not feel the way they are doing it is working," he said. He compared it to the government addressing transportation problems by giving out bus passes -- even to people who don't have access to public transit.
But it can make the ongoing debate on reviving the economy tough. To these respondents, Huffmon said, the stimulus and recovery program isn't working. "That's a blow to supporters of the current program," he said. Yet the sentiment is strong for government intervention, a blow to conservatives who want the government's hands off the recovery.
"Neither side should be fully happy with these results," Huffmon said.
The Winthrop Poll also found a sizable number of people who weren't decided on a national health care overhaul, the nation's biggest ongoing political and policy debate. Southerners were asked if they'd call on their federal legislators to vote for or against the legislation. Just under a third said they would encourage a vote for the bill and 42 percent said they'd encourage a vote against it.
However, a quarter had no opinion. "That ought to be a stunning finding given how much information has been put out there about the health care debate," Huffmon said.
President Barack Obama mostly faired well in poll, with 84 percent saying he was good communicator, 76 percent that he was warm and friendly and 54 percent that he was trustworthy, a question that broke sharply along partisan lines.
More than 61 percent said Obama "cared about like people like me," including 51 percent of white males.
The Winthrop Poll involved randomly dialed land and cellular telephone interviews with 886 people 18 and older in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. The interviews were conducted between Oct. 24 and Nov. 7. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.3 percent.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
10 Suicides a Month at Ft. Hood -- War Stress Is Taking Soldiers to the Brink
I wish I know more about PTSD. I certainly cannot imagine it. But I think that it is probably an epidemic most don't think about, and more should be done to help soldiers cope.
BY Dahr Jamail
10 November 2009
AlterNet
PHOENIX, Arizona - While investigators probe for a motive behind the mass shooting at the Fort Hood military base in Texas last Thursday, in which an army psychiatrist killed 13 people, military personnel at the base are in shock as the incident "brings the war home".
"We're all in shock," said Specialist Michael Kern, an active-duty veteran of the Iraq war, told Inter Press Service (IPS) by telephone. Kern, who is based at Fort Hood, served in Iraq from March 2007 to March 2008. "Every single person that I've talked to is in shock," Kern added.
"I'm surprised this hits so close to home, but at the same time, I knew something like this was going to happen given what else is happening - the war is coming home, and something needs to be done. Innocent civilians are being wounded and killed here at home by soldiers, and this is completely unacceptable," he said.
The gunman, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, entered a Soldier Readiness Center (SRC), where troops get medical evaluations and complete paperwork just prior to being deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, and opened fire with two non-military issued handguns.
Hasan killed 13 people, 12 of them soldiers, and wounded over 30 others, before being shot four times by a civilian police officer. Hasan is now in stable condition in a local hospital, where he is in the custody of military authorities.
Colonel John Rossi, a spokesman at Fort Hood, told reporters that Hasan was "stable and in one of our civilian hospitals". Rossi added, "He's on a ventilator."
Hasan, 39, joined the army just out of high school. He had counseled wounded war veterans at Walter Reed Hospital, and was transferred to Fort Hood in April. He had recently received orders to deploy to Afghanistan.
His cousin, Nader Hasan, has said in media interviews that Hasan was very reluctant to be deployed overseas and had agitated not to be sent. "We've known over the last five years that was probably his worst nightmare," he said.
Responding to the allegations in the media that the attack was based on his Muslim faith, Kern told IPS that he did not know of anyone on the base who felt this was the case.
"We all wear the same uniform here, it's all green. I've seen the news, but most folks here assume it's just a soldier that snapped," Kern explained. "I have not talked to anyone who thinks what he did has anything to do with him being a Muslim. There are thousands of Muslims serving with dignity in the US military, in all four branches."
Fort Hood, located in central Texas, is one of the largest US military bases in the world. It contains up to 50,000 soldiers, and is one of the most heavily deployed to both occupations.
Tragically, Fort Hood has also born much of the brunt from its heavy involvement in the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Fort Hood soldiers have accounted for more suicides than any other army post since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. This year alone, the base is averaging over 10 suicides each month - at least 75 have been recorded through July of this year alone.
In a strikingly similar incident on May 11, 2009, a US soldier gunned down five fellow soldiers at a stress-counseling center at a US base in Baghdad.
Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the US military's Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters at a news conference at the Pentagon at the time that the shootings had occurred in a place where "individuals were seeking help".
Mullen added, "It does speak to me, though, about the need for us to redouble our efforts, the concern in terms of dealing with the stress ... It also speaks to the issue of multiple deployments."
Commenting on the incident in nearly parallel terms, US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said that the Pentagon needs to redouble its efforts to relieve stress caused by repeated deployments in war zones that is further exacerbated by limited time at home in between deployments.
The condition described by Mullen and Gates is what veteran health experts often refer to as post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.
While soldiers returning home are routinely involved in shootings, suicide and other forms of self-destructive violent behaviors as a direct result of their experiences in Iraq, we have yet to see an event of this magnitude on a base in the US.
To many, the shocking story of a soldier killing five of his comrades did not come as a surprise considering that the military has, for years now, been sending troops with untreated PTSD back into the US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.
According to an Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center analysis, reported in the Denver Post in August 2008, more than "43,000 service members - two-thirds of them in the army or army reserve - were classified as non-deployable for medical reasons three months before they deployed" to Iraq.
In April 2008, the Rand Corporation released a stunning report revealing that, "Nearly 20% of military service members who have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan - 300,000 in all -- report symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression, yet only slightly more than half have sought treatment."
President Barack Obama, speaking during an event at the Department of the Interior in Washington, said that the mass shooting at Fort Hood was a "horrific outburst of violence". He added: "It is horrifying that they [US soldiers] should come under fire at an army base on American soil."
Victor Agosto, an Iraq war veteran who was discharged from the military after publicly refusing to deploy to Afghanistan, has had first-hand experience with the SRC at Fort Hood, where he too was based.
"I knew there would be a confrontation when I was there, because the only reason to do that process is to deploy," Agosto, speaking to IPS near Fort Hood, explained.
Agosto was court-martialed for refusing an order to go to the SRC to prepare to deploy to Afghanistan.
"I was court-martialed for refusing the order to SRC in that very same building. I didn't enter the building, but I didn't go in because I was refusing the process," Agosto continued. "It's a pretty important place in my life, so it's interesting to me that this happened there."
BY Dahr Jamail
10 November 2009
AlterNet
PHOENIX, Arizona - While investigators probe for a motive behind the mass shooting at the Fort Hood military base in Texas last Thursday, in which an army psychiatrist killed 13 people, military personnel at the base are in shock as the incident "brings the war home".
"We're all in shock," said Specialist Michael Kern, an active-duty veteran of the Iraq war, told Inter Press Service (IPS) by telephone. Kern, who is based at Fort Hood, served in Iraq from March 2007 to March 2008. "Every single person that I've talked to is in shock," Kern added.
"I'm surprised this hits so close to home, but at the same time, I knew something like this was going to happen given what else is happening - the war is coming home, and something needs to be done. Innocent civilians are being wounded and killed here at home by soldiers, and this is completely unacceptable," he said.
The gunman, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, entered a Soldier Readiness Center (SRC), where troops get medical evaluations and complete paperwork just prior to being deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, and opened fire with two non-military issued handguns.
Hasan killed 13 people, 12 of them soldiers, and wounded over 30 others, before being shot four times by a civilian police officer. Hasan is now in stable condition in a local hospital, where he is in the custody of military authorities.
Colonel John Rossi, a spokesman at Fort Hood, told reporters that Hasan was "stable and in one of our civilian hospitals". Rossi added, "He's on a ventilator."
Hasan, 39, joined the army just out of high school. He had counseled wounded war veterans at Walter Reed Hospital, and was transferred to Fort Hood in April. He had recently received orders to deploy to Afghanistan.
His cousin, Nader Hasan, has said in media interviews that Hasan was very reluctant to be deployed overseas and had agitated not to be sent. "We've known over the last five years that was probably his worst nightmare," he said.
Responding to the allegations in the media that the attack was based on his Muslim faith, Kern told IPS that he did not know of anyone on the base who felt this was the case.
"We all wear the same uniform here, it's all green. I've seen the news, but most folks here assume it's just a soldier that snapped," Kern explained. "I have not talked to anyone who thinks what he did has anything to do with him being a Muslim. There are thousands of Muslims serving with dignity in the US military, in all four branches."
Fort Hood, located in central Texas, is one of the largest US military bases in the world. It contains up to 50,000 soldiers, and is one of the most heavily deployed to both occupations.
Tragically, Fort Hood has also born much of the brunt from its heavy involvement in the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Fort Hood soldiers have accounted for more suicides than any other army post since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. This year alone, the base is averaging over 10 suicides each month - at least 75 have been recorded through July of this year alone.
In a strikingly similar incident on May 11, 2009, a US soldier gunned down five fellow soldiers at a stress-counseling center at a US base in Baghdad.
Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the US military's Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters at a news conference at the Pentagon at the time that the shootings had occurred in a place where "individuals were seeking help".
Mullen added, "It does speak to me, though, about the need for us to redouble our efforts, the concern in terms of dealing with the stress ... It also speaks to the issue of multiple deployments."
Commenting on the incident in nearly parallel terms, US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said that the Pentagon needs to redouble its efforts to relieve stress caused by repeated deployments in war zones that is further exacerbated by limited time at home in between deployments.
The condition described by Mullen and Gates is what veteran health experts often refer to as post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.
While soldiers returning home are routinely involved in shootings, suicide and other forms of self-destructive violent behaviors as a direct result of their experiences in Iraq, we have yet to see an event of this magnitude on a base in the US.
To many, the shocking story of a soldier killing five of his comrades did not come as a surprise considering that the military has, for years now, been sending troops with untreated PTSD back into the US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.
According to an Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center analysis, reported in the Denver Post in August 2008, more than "43,000 service members - two-thirds of them in the army or army reserve - were classified as non-deployable for medical reasons three months before they deployed" to Iraq.
In April 2008, the Rand Corporation released a stunning report revealing that, "Nearly 20% of military service members who have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan - 300,000 in all -- report symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression, yet only slightly more than half have sought treatment."
President Barack Obama, speaking during an event at the Department of the Interior in Washington, said that the mass shooting at Fort Hood was a "horrific outburst of violence". He added: "It is horrifying that they [US soldiers] should come under fire at an army base on American soil."
Victor Agosto, an Iraq war veteran who was discharged from the military after publicly refusing to deploy to Afghanistan, has had first-hand experience with the SRC at Fort Hood, where he too was based.
"I knew there would be a confrontation when I was there, because the only reason to do that process is to deploy," Agosto, speaking to IPS near Fort Hood, explained.
Agosto was court-martialed for refusing an order to go to the SRC to prepare to deploy to Afghanistan.
"I was court-martialed for refusing the order to SRC in that very same building. I didn't enter the building, but I didn't go in because I was refusing the process," Agosto continued. "It's a pretty important place in my life, so it's interesting to me that this happened there."
Monday, November 9, 2009
The Movie "Paranormal Activity"
The bottom line is that I was disappointed. Maybe my expectations were too high. I'd been hearing good things about the movie, how scary it was. It wasn't that scary to me. The ending seems typical---what you would expect in retrospect. It seems normal for me to be disappointed with a supposed scary movie.
Sunday, November 8, 2009
I Wish I had the Expertise
I wish I had the expertise to do research in how the digital world is altering our brains.
by Nicholas Carr
The informavore in its cage
November 06, 2009
Edge is featuring, in "The Age of the Informavore," a fascinating interview with Frank Schirrmacher, the influential science and culture editor at Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung."The question I am asking myself," Schirrmacher says, "[which] arose through work and through discussion with other people, and especially watching other people, watching them act and behave and talk, [is] how technology, the Internet and the modern systems, has now apparently changed human behavior, the way humans express themselves, and the way humans think in real life ... And you encounter this not only in a theoretical way, but when you meet people, when suddenly people start forgetting things, when suddenly people depend on their gadgets, and other stuff, to remember certain things. This is the beginning, its just an experience. But if you think about it and you think about your own behavior, you suddenly realize that something fundamental is going on."
Tell me about it.
Later in the interview, Schirrmacher wonders what the effects will be as companies collect ever more behavioral data and apply ever more sophisticated predictive algorithms to it:
You have a generation — in the next evolutionary stages, the child of today — which [is adapting] to systems such as the iTunes "Genius", which not only know which book or which music file they like, [but] which [go] farther and farther in [predicting] certain things, like predicting whether the concert I am watching tonight is good or bad. Google will know it beforehand, because they know how people talk about it.
What will this mean for the question of free will? Because, in the bottom line, there are, of course, algorithms, who analyze or who calculate certain predictabilities ... The question of prediction will be the issue of the future and such questions will have impact on the concept of free will. We are now confronted with theories by psychologist John Bargh and others who claim there is no such thing as free will. This kind of claim is a very big issue here in Germany and it will be a much more important issue in the future than we think today. The way we predict our own life, the way we are predicted by others, through the cloud, through the way we are linked to the Internet, will be matters that impact every aspect of our lives. And, of course, this will play out in the work force — the new German government seems to be very keen on this issue, to at least prevent the worst impact on people, on workplaces.
It's very important to stress that we are not talking about cultural pessimism. What we are talking about is that a new technology which is in fact a technology which is a brain technology, to put it this way, which is a technology which has to do with intelligence, which has to do with thinking, that this new technology now clashes in a very real way with the history of thought in the European way of thinking.
The interview has drawn many responses (including one from me), the most recent of which is from John Bargh, who heads Yale's Automaticity in Cognition, Motivation and Evaluation Lab. He picks up on Schirrmacher's comments on prediction and describes how recent research in brain science is opening up powerful new possibilities for manipulating human behavior:
Schirrmacher is quite right to worry about the consequences of a universally available digitized knowledge base, especially if it concerns predicting what people will do. And most especially if artificial intelligence agents can begin to search and put together the burgeoning data base about what situation (or prime) X will cause a person to do. The discovery of the pervasiveness of situational priming influences for all of the higher mental processes in humans does say something fundamentally new about human nature (for example, how tightly tied and responsive is our functioning to our particular physical and social surroundings). It removes consciousness or free will as the bottleneck that exclusively generates choices and behavioral impulses, replacing it with the physical and social world itself as the source of these impulses. ...
It is because priming studies are so relatively easy to perform that this method has opened up research on the prediction and control of human judgment and behavior, 'democratized' it, basically, because studies can be done much more quickly and efficiently, and done well even by relatively untrained undergraduate and graduate students. This has indeed produced (and is still producing) an explosion of knowledge of the IF-THEN contingencies of human responses to the physical and social environment. And so I do worry with Schirrmacher on this score, because we [are] so rapidly building a database or atlas of unconscious influences and effects that could well be exploited by ever-faster computing devices, as the knowledge is accumulating at an exponential rate. ...
More frightening to me still is Schirrmacher's postulated intelligent artificial agents who can, as in the Google Books example, search and access this knowledge base so quickly, and then integrate it to be used in real-time applications to manipulate the target individual to think or feel or behave in ways that suit the agent's (or its owner's) agenda of purposes.
The Web has been called a "database of intentions." The bigger that database grows, and the more deeply it is mined, the more difficult it may become to discern whether those intentions are our own or ones that have been implanted in us.
by Nicholas Carr
The informavore in its cage
November 06, 2009
Edge is featuring, in "The Age of the Informavore," a fascinating interview with Frank Schirrmacher, the influential science and culture editor at Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung."The question I am asking myself," Schirrmacher says, "[which] arose through work and through discussion with other people, and especially watching other people, watching them act and behave and talk, [is] how technology, the Internet and the modern systems, has now apparently changed human behavior, the way humans express themselves, and the way humans think in real life ... And you encounter this not only in a theoretical way, but when you meet people, when suddenly people start forgetting things, when suddenly people depend on their gadgets, and other stuff, to remember certain things. This is the beginning, its just an experience. But if you think about it and you think about your own behavior, you suddenly realize that something fundamental is going on."
Tell me about it.
Later in the interview, Schirrmacher wonders what the effects will be as companies collect ever more behavioral data and apply ever more sophisticated predictive algorithms to it:
You have a generation — in the next evolutionary stages, the child of today — which [is adapting] to systems such as the iTunes "Genius", which not only know which book or which music file they like, [but] which [go] farther and farther in [predicting] certain things, like predicting whether the concert I am watching tonight is good or bad. Google will know it beforehand, because they know how people talk about it.
What will this mean for the question of free will? Because, in the bottom line, there are, of course, algorithms, who analyze or who calculate certain predictabilities ... The question of prediction will be the issue of the future and such questions will have impact on the concept of free will. We are now confronted with theories by psychologist John Bargh and others who claim there is no such thing as free will. This kind of claim is a very big issue here in Germany and it will be a much more important issue in the future than we think today. The way we predict our own life, the way we are predicted by others, through the cloud, through the way we are linked to the Internet, will be matters that impact every aspect of our lives. And, of course, this will play out in the work force — the new German government seems to be very keen on this issue, to at least prevent the worst impact on people, on workplaces.
It's very important to stress that we are not talking about cultural pessimism. What we are talking about is that a new technology which is in fact a technology which is a brain technology, to put it this way, which is a technology which has to do with intelligence, which has to do with thinking, that this new technology now clashes in a very real way with the history of thought in the European way of thinking.
The interview has drawn many responses (including one from me), the most recent of which is from John Bargh, who heads Yale's Automaticity in Cognition, Motivation and Evaluation Lab. He picks up on Schirrmacher's comments on prediction and describes how recent research in brain science is opening up powerful new possibilities for manipulating human behavior:
Schirrmacher is quite right to worry about the consequences of a universally available digitized knowledge base, especially if it concerns predicting what people will do. And most especially if artificial intelligence agents can begin to search and put together the burgeoning data base about what situation (or prime) X will cause a person to do. The discovery of the pervasiveness of situational priming influences for all of the higher mental processes in humans does say something fundamentally new about human nature (for example, how tightly tied and responsive is our functioning to our particular physical and social surroundings). It removes consciousness or free will as the bottleneck that exclusively generates choices and behavioral impulses, replacing it with the physical and social world itself as the source of these impulses. ...
It is because priming studies are so relatively easy to perform that this method has opened up research on the prediction and control of human judgment and behavior, 'democratized' it, basically, because studies can be done much more quickly and efficiently, and done well even by relatively untrained undergraduate and graduate students. This has indeed produced (and is still producing) an explosion of knowledge of the IF-THEN contingencies of human responses to the physical and social environment. And so I do worry with Schirrmacher on this score, because we [are] so rapidly building a database or atlas of unconscious influences and effects that could well be exploited by ever-faster computing devices, as the knowledge is accumulating at an exponential rate. ...
More frightening to me still is Schirrmacher's postulated intelligent artificial agents who can, as in the Google Books example, search and access this knowledge base so quickly, and then integrate it to be used in real-time applications to manipulate the target individual to think or feel or behave in ways that suit the agent's (or its owner's) agenda of purposes.
The Web has been called a "database of intentions." The bigger that database grows, and the more deeply it is mined, the more difficult it may become to discern whether those intentions are our own or ones that have been implanted in us.
Why Not Both?
Why not BOTH paper and digital? That's my solution.
08 Nov 2009 12:35 pm
Running With Informavores
Nick Bilton is one voice in an exchange about digital information over at Edge:
I feel the same comfort from a pack of informavores rummaging together through the ever-growing pile of information while the analog generation still feels towards an edited newspaper or the neatly packaged one-hour nightly news show ... Every moment of our day revolves around the idea of telling stories. So why should a select group of people in the world be the only ones with a soapbox or the keys to the printing press to tell their stories? Let everyone share their information, build their communities, and contribute to the conversation.
Nick Carr highlights other aspects of the debate. Personally, I love both ways of understanding the changing world. I still read my NYT on dead-tree every morning, with coffee and ginger snaps, and then plunge into the bloggy chaos. Why do we always have to choose between them? Why not both
08 Nov 2009 12:35 pm
Running With Informavores
Nick Bilton is one voice in an exchange about digital information over at Edge:
I feel the same comfort from a pack of informavores rummaging together through the ever-growing pile of information while the analog generation still feels towards an edited newspaper or the neatly packaged one-hour nightly news show ... Every moment of our day revolves around the idea of telling stories. So why should a select group of people in the world be the only ones with a soapbox or the keys to the printing press to tell their stories? Let everyone share their information, build their communities, and contribute to the conversation.
Nick Carr highlights other aspects of the debate. Personally, I love both ways of understanding the changing world. I still read my NYT on dead-tree every morning, with coffee and ginger snaps, and then plunge into the bloggy chaos. Why do we always have to choose between them? Why not both
Palin's Game
07 Nov 2009 07:46 pm
Sunlight And Palin
A reader writes:
You ask, what it is about sunlight and open debate that Palin is afraid of.
My guess is that it isn't fear. (Though she knows on some level that she's not capable of debate with her dismal language skills.) I think that it's because the debate isn't the point. Because she doesn't want debate. Her sole objective, and that of the neocons who back her, is to continue consolidating a rabid right wing base, to reinforce the views they already have and then send them out to keep their fellow members of the base in line.
She's simply to serve as the beacon to draw them, and the fount of "wisdom" if you will giving them elementary level talking points to carry forth and congeal their allegiance, cement it, and hopefully draw in their neighbors votes. And their money of course.
She isn't about debate. She's preaching to her choir. She's keeping them on the same page of the hymnal and singing the same tune.Louder and louder. I mean, it's pretty clear by now isn't it that the GOP is now the right wing, and that they have no interest in opposing views or drawing in other people? The Big Tent is now only open to the already converted and the true believers.
Sunlight And Palin
A reader writes:
You ask, what it is about sunlight and open debate that Palin is afraid of.
My guess is that it isn't fear. (Though she knows on some level that she's not capable of debate with her dismal language skills.) I think that it's because the debate isn't the point. Because she doesn't want debate. Her sole objective, and that of the neocons who back her, is to continue consolidating a rabid right wing base, to reinforce the views they already have and then send them out to keep their fellow members of the base in line.
She's simply to serve as the beacon to draw them, and the fount of "wisdom" if you will giving them elementary level talking points to carry forth and congeal their allegiance, cement it, and hopefully draw in their neighbors votes. And their money of course.
She isn't about debate. She's preaching to her choir. She's keeping them on the same page of the hymnal and singing the same tune.Louder and louder. I mean, it's pretty clear by now isn't it that the GOP is now the right wing, and that they have no interest in opposing views or drawing in other people? The Big Tent is now only open to the already converted and the true believers.
The Waning of the South's Political Influence?
→ Culture, Politics
Gone With the Wind
— By Kevin Drum | Wed November 4, 2009 3:25 PM PST
After the election last November I noted that "for the first time since Reconstruction, the South will be almost completely shut out of national power....This is the first time this will be true in well over a century."
Over at the Economist, an exile from Dixie puts a little more meat on those bones. During the 90s and early oughts, he notes, Washington was almost completely controlled by Southerners: Clinton, Gore, Gingrich, Armey, Lott, Bush, Frist, and DeLay. "It was southerners in every position of power for an unusually long time."
In 2006, things started to go wrong. Nancy Pelosi (California) and Harry Reid (Nevada) took over the top jobs in Congress. Then Barack Obama (Illinois) was elected president, and declined to balance his ticket regionally by picking a southerner.
But the Republican leadership shifted too. The party ran two non-southerners for president and vice-president in John McCain and Sarah Palin. The RNC is now run by a black Marylander, Michael Steele. The House minority leader, John Boehner, hails from Ohio. The whip's job has gone to Eric Cantor who, though Virginian, is an atypical southern Republican in being Jewish. Only Mitch McConnell (Kentucky), the Senate majority leader, is the stereotypical white Protestant southerner. His whip and assistant, John Kyl, comes from Arizona.
"I want my country back," has become a conservative-populist rallying cry. They have not truly lost their country, but have seen a wild swing of power north and towards the coasts. It won't last, either. But it's a painful reality right now for a region that once revelled in separatism, then dominated the country as a whole for an oddly long stretch.
Despite the oceans of ink spent analyzing the electoral shift in 2006 and 2008, I continue to think this transformation has been underappreciated. The Old South has punched above its weight in American politics ever since 1787, and during the few times their influence has temporarily waned (Reconstruction, the 60s) it drove them crazy with fear and persecution mongering. So it's not really surprising that it's happening again.
It's hard to say what's next. Republicans are the party of the South these days, and sure, the GOP will regain power eventually. But will they be able to do it if they remain a party dominated by the culture of Dixie? Demographics suggest pretty strongly that they can't, which means that eventually the South will have to come to grips with the fact that they no longer hold the whip hand in American politics and probably never will again. This means acknowledging that they're just another region, one with influence that waxes and wanes but basically corresponds to their population. I wonder how long it will take for them to do that?
Gone With the Wind
— By Kevin Drum | Wed November 4, 2009 3:25 PM PST
After the election last November I noted that "for the first time since Reconstruction, the South will be almost completely shut out of national power....This is the first time this will be true in well over a century."
Over at the Economist, an exile from Dixie puts a little more meat on those bones. During the 90s and early oughts, he notes, Washington was almost completely controlled by Southerners: Clinton, Gore, Gingrich, Armey, Lott, Bush, Frist, and DeLay. "It was southerners in every position of power for an unusually long time."
In 2006, things started to go wrong. Nancy Pelosi (California) and Harry Reid (Nevada) took over the top jobs in Congress. Then Barack Obama (Illinois) was elected president, and declined to balance his ticket regionally by picking a southerner.
But the Republican leadership shifted too. The party ran two non-southerners for president and vice-president in John McCain and Sarah Palin. The RNC is now run by a black Marylander, Michael Steele. The House minority leader, John Boehner, hails from Ohio. The whip's job has gone to Eric Cantor who, though Virginian, is an atypical southern Republican in being Jewish. Only Mitch McConnell (Kentucky), the Senate majority leader, is the stereotypical white Protestant southerner. His whip and assistant, John Kyl, comes from Arizona.
"I want my country back," has become a conservative-populist rallying cry. They have not truly lost their country, but have seen a wild swing of power north and towards the coasts. It won't last, either. But it's a painful reality right now for a region that once revelled in separatism, then dominated the country as a whole for an oddly long stretch.
Despite the oceans of ink spent analyzing the electoral shift in 2006 and 2008, I continue to think this transformation has been underappreciated. The Old South has punched above its weight in American politics ever since 1787, and during the few times their influence has temporarily waned (Reconstruction, the 60s) it drove them crazy with fear and persecution mongering. So it's not really surprising that it's happening again.
It's hard to say what's next. Republicans are the party of the South these days, and sure, the GOP will regain power eventually. But will they be able to do it if they remain a party dominated by the culture of Dixie? Demographics suggest pretty strongly that they can't, which means that eventually the South will have to come to grips with the fact that they no longer hold the whip hand in American politics and probably never will again. This means acknowledging that they're just another region, one with influence that waxes and wanes but basically corresponds to their population. I wonder how long it will take for them to do that?
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