Does it Matter Who The News Recommends?
Mike Hashimoto, in The Dallas Morning News Opinion blog, expresses frustration that the candidate endorsements of the News have so little impact on how people vote. He asks whether the paper should expend the time and energy to recommend in races big and small?
Voters don't need newspaper recommendations. What they need is information. The news media could provide a service to voters if they would publish three paragraphs for each electoral race. First, the Republican view of the pros of the Republican candidate and the cons of the Democratic candidate. Second, the Democratic side of the debate. Third, the newspaper's own fact-checking of the claims in the first two paragraphs.
P.S. Mike Hashimoto himself could always write the first paragraph. Which is why the second and third paragraphs are so desperately needed.
Like the World Doesn't Have Enough Blogs
Just in case you thought The Dallas Morning News itself isn't running enough blogs, their own bloggers are now passing on word of a free-lance blog written by one of their own free-lance writers, Trey Garrison. Garrison has bounced around, from the embarrassing Dallas Blog to the intentionally sophomoric and snarky Frontburner, to the occasional guest column in The Dallas Morning News.
Trey Garrison is a libertarian, which in many cases just means a conservative Republican who is too embarrassed by the excesses of his party to publicly wear the label. That lets libertarians like Garrison throw rocks at liberals while simultaneously denying any affiliation with the small government advocates from Reagan to Bush who actually achieve power and expand government spending and control and curtailment of civil liberties. Garrison plays well the role of Republican propagandist with plausible deniability.
Sampling the early servings on Trey Garrison's blog finds a mockery of Cesar Chavez's labor movement and Russ Feingold's campaign finance reform; criticism of suggestions that Sarah Palin ought to moderate her right wing views; praise for ExxonMobil's windfall profits and Plano's ability to keep out the riff-raff; and Garrison's own evolving position on immigration (he was against it until he decided that opposition was futile, so you "may as well enjoy getting your house built, lawn cut, and fruit picked at a discount"). When you tire of reading standard Republican talking points, I recommend you try reading Trey Garrison's less predictable, if just as arrogant, right wing commentary. I find him oddly entertaining, in small doses.
6 comments:
Warning: pre-coffee noodling follows.
re: Libertarians as crypto-Republicans.
There was a quote some years ago: Libertarians are "Republicans without God".
I think it's an oversimplification and says more about our entrenched habits of thinking about American politics through a Two Dominant Parties lens than it does about Libertarians. We could also say "Democrats with minimal government".
I do admit that Libertarians probably skew right the same way that Greens probably skew left.
A Fair Vote / Instant Runoff Vote scenario would flush out people's *real* political desires and stop them from defaulting to one of the Big Two out of exhaustion.
Libertarians would vote L instead of R. Greens would vote G instead of D.
If I had IRV I would vote Barr --> Obama --> McCain. Truly, Obama will be the next president, and I am looking forward to having someone thoughtful and verbally coherent in office.
There's a lot in meat on that pre-coffee noodling. Politics is the art of over-simplification, a fact that McCain knows how to exploit and that makes Obama both refreshing and a distinct underdog.
Sure, I'm simplifying by equating Libertarians with Republicans, but I don't think it's a coincidence that this year's Libertarian candidate, Bob Barr, is a long-time Republican and one-time Libertarian nominee Ron Paul now runs as a Republican. Libertarians would fit nicely under a Republican big tent, if they had such a thing.
I'm all for an instant-runoff system of voting, but the political parties will never allow it to happen.
Most libertarians I know are either "don't tread on me" punks like Garrison or narcissists of the "traffic signals impede my sacred freedom of movement" school of anti-government blather.
That characterization is a simplification, but it suggests a deeper truth, that libertarianism doesn't scale. A small town might be better off getting rid of its traffic signal, but a major city would have chaos if traffic rules were suspended. Similarly for much of what libertarians advocate.
Clarification: I meant that my own "Republicans without God" quote was a simplification; I wasn't banging on Ed's observation on the topic.
Anecdote: I know the traffic light was an offhand example, but allow me to use it to make a point about personal liberty and responsibility.
I lived in [the former] West Germany, where people take driving and responsibility very seriously. Stoplights were relatively rare where smaller streets crossed larger ones. Instead there were signs that indicated which road had right-of-way. If there was no competing traffic you proceeded. If there was competing traffic and you had right-of-way you proceeded. If there was competing traffic and you didn't have right-of-way you yielded.
In this kind of a intersection traffic almost never stopped. The flow was quite smooth. No reason to protect sheeple from each other by displaying a red light; the humans judged the situation correctly and safely. Those that could not make such decisions were not granted licenses. This was in real cities that have had paved roads longer than America has been on the map. :-)
IRV: I do agree that the IRV is a threat to the two main parties, and as such will make little or no real progress.
Scaling: I do not accept that Libertarianism doesn't scale. It scales (fractally?) the way markets do; individuals make economic decisions on the small scale that affects, shapes, and creates the larger markets and economies.
But even if I were to grant that Libertarian doesn't scale, what *does*? Democracy? If classical democracy scaled we wouldn't have designed in a republic.
OK, we're getting off topic, but road design experimentation is leading to counter-intuitive discoveries. Roundabouts keep traffic flowing without stop signs or red lights, getting more cars through the intersection faster with fewer accidents to boot, in part because they seem more dangerous. People are more alert in them than in signal-controlled intersections. Wired had a recent story on even more radical rethinking of road design. Check it out.
As for another point, democracy doesn't scale, but republics do. That was understood even in the eighteenth century. A case can be made that we've exceeded a population limit for any system of government of the people, by the people, for the people. The American republic may be inadequate but the alternatives look worse.
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