George Lakoff’s “A Framing Memo for Occupy Wall Street” at Reader Supported News contains some sound advice for the protesters. Lakoff, author of “The Political Mind: Why You Can’t Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain,” shares some good insights here, among them, “Occupy elections: voter registration drives, town hall meetings, talk radio airtime, party organizations, nomination campaigns, election campaigns, and voting booths…Above all: Frame yourselves before others frame you.”
One of the frequently-heard cynical utterances in Georgia is “Thank God for Mississippi,” because they almost always edge out the Peach State in the race to the bottom regarding various educational statistics. Well, today it’s “Thank God for Alabama,” which has topped even GA in the quest for bad press for having the most idiotic, destructive and racist immigration law. This New York Times editorial explains it well.
Speaking of vicious, self-destructive immigration policies, Trip Gabriel’s “Comments on Immigration Alienate Some Hispanics,” also in the NYT, discusses the boomerang potential of immigrant-bashing in the GOP Vegas debate.
At Daily Kos, Chris Bowers flags new and recent polls indicating strong public support for OWS. Bowers cautions “These are great numbers for Occupy Wall Street, but they should be digested with an important qualifier. By a four-to-one margin, those who agree with Occupy Wall Street “mostly agree” rather than “completely agree.” When polls are heavy with “somewhat” or “mostly” responses, that is often a sign that opinions are not well formed on that subject matter. As such, the challenge for Occupy Wall Street moving forward will be to solidify its broad, but soft, support.”
Gotta love Blue Texan’s comment at Firedoglake.com on Sarah Palin’s diss of Gov. Perry’s immigration policy: “Man, just when the Secessionist needed a life preserver — she throws him an anvil.”
Interesting read at Foreign Policy, where Jacob Heilbrunn has a lament “Twilight of the Wise Man,” concerning the demise of, well, sanity among the GOP’s international affairs gurus, in particular the once-influential but now besieged-by-the-tea-party Sen. Richard Lugar. “This kind of above-politics deal-making on matters of global importance was once the hallmark of a whole caste of Republican policymakers, the so-called “wise men”: avatars of the establishment who always maintained that foreign affairs is a lofty sphere to be left untainted by partisan bickering.”
AP’s article, “Ohio Union Fight Could Boost Dems’ 2012 Chances” by Ann Sanner and Sam Hananel quotes former Democratic Governor Ted Strickland on the importance of the November 8 referendum regarding whether to dump Ohio’s draconian restrictions on public employee unions: “If we were to win, I think it would be a major encouragement that will be hugely beneficial, not only to Democrats running for the state House and state Senate, but I think it would be a huge benefit to Senator (Sherrod) Brown and to President Obama.”
WaPo Fact-Checker Glenn Kessler doesn’t merely shred the job-creation claim made by Sens. McCain, Paul and Portman about their “ludicrous” alternative to the President’s jobs bill; he pulverizes it to smithereens.
Joe Slade White and Ben Nuckels discuss “The unconventional campaign that helped Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn secure an improbable win” in their Campaigns & Elections post, “Values, Timing and Breaking the ‘Rules.” The authors answer some interesting questions, including: “So how did the pundits and insiders have it so wrong? How did the Quinn campaign get outspent by over a million dollars on TV in the last eight weeks and still pull off a victory? And how did Quinn win, while the Democratic candidate to fill President Barack Obama’s old Senate seat lost?”
Aspiring authors take note of Herman Cain’s clever formula for getting your book on the best-seller list: Run for Prez, shell out $36K of campaign cash for copies of your own book, bought from your own company and..voila! Greg Howard fleshes out the scam at Slate.com.

Sam Stein reports at HuffPo on evidence of new sleazoid right-wing sting operations cropping up. Stein explains a recent scam to entrap the Economic Policy Institute:

…When EPI’s President Lawrence Mishel was targeted last week in what appeared to be a conservative media sting operation, led by infamous saboteur James O’Keefe, it was a point of pride. The 25-year-old non-profit think tank officially has enough gravitas to be vilified.
“I’m honored to be the subject of their attention,” Mishel told The Huffington Post. “When we get attacked by the Wall Street Journal editorial page, I tell my people, ‘Be proud.’ I never got listed by Glenn Beck. I felt left out because I feel like I’m an important person on the left.”
While it remains uncertain whether or not EPI has become the subject of one of O’Keefe’s undercover investigations — the list of past subjects includes ACORN, CNN, National Public Radio, Occupy Wall Street, and Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) — several signs suggest that he targeted the think tank.

In another recent incident, Stein reports that Policy Matters Ohio was targeted for a phony bribe to see if they would twist data in a study for payment by a hedge-fund manager, who was supposedly affiliated with the Ohio Education Association. They gave a phony email address with the domain name “ohioedassoc.org,” which has nothing to do with the Ohio Education Association. Stein adds:

So who runs ohioedassoc.org? The website, according to online records, is registered to Shane Cory, the Acting Executive Director of Project Veritas. Reached by phone, Cory noted that he owns “hundreds” of domain names. Later he confirmed that this particular one was indeed owned by Project Veritas. “From there,” he added, “I really don’t know what’s going on.”

Project Veritas was started by James O’Keefe, according to Stein. Wonder where they get the money for all those domain names.
The moral blind spot of the right-wing scamsters who earn their keep on trickery and deceit is kind of pathetic. Even more regrettable, however, is the reluctance of mainstream conservatives to denounce their actions.

Ah, some new data rendering the myth of the ‘liberal media’ into a pile of rubble. As Politico’s Keach Hagey reports on a new Pew Research study of “11,500 news outlets — including news websites and transcripts of radio and television broadcasts, at both the local and national levels — as well as hundreds of thousands of blogs”:

Sarah Palin put an end to her possible presidential candidacy this month with a familiar parting critique: President Barack Obama has an unfair advantage as a candidate because he’s got “about 90 percent of the media still there in his back pocket.”
…But a study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism finds that, in the past five months, the reverse has actually been true: Obama has received the most unremittingly negative press of any of the presidential candidates by a wide margin, with negative assessments outweighing positive ones by four to one.
Pew found that just 9 percent of the president’s coverage was positive, while 34 percent was negative — a stark contrast to the 32 percent positive coverage and 20 percent negative that it found Texas Gov. Rick Perry, the most covered Republican, received.
“His coverage has been substantially more negative in every one of the last 23 weeks of the last five months — even the week that Bin Laden was killed,” Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, said of the president’s treatment in the media compared with that of the GOP field.

The wingnuttiest Republicans got plenty of positive coverage, as Pew reports:

The top four most favorably covered candidates, the study found, were all tea party favorites: Perry was followed by Palin, with 31 percent positive coverage and 22 percent negative; Michele Bachmann, with 31 percent positive coverage and 23 percent negative; and Herman Cain, with 28 percent positive coverage and 23 percent negative…Mitt Romney’s positive and negative coverage were almost in a dead heat at 26 percent and 27 percent, respectively.

Of course there is always a cautionary note with this kind of data. Some publications carry a lot more weight than others, as do some stories. Associated Press stories, for example, tend to appear in hundreds of newspapers. Hagey quotes one AP story that put a negative spin even on the killing of bin Laden:

A nation surly over rising gas prices, stubbornly high unemployment and nasty partisan politics poured into the street to wildly cheer President Barack Obama’s announcement that Osama bin Laden, the world’s most wanted man, had been killed by U.S. forces after a decadelong manhunt. The outcome could not have come at a better time for Obama, sagging in the polls as he embarks on his reelection campaign.

Hagey goes on to show that, despite negative stories in the “liberal” media, Perry and Palin have gotten pretty positive coverage, according to the Pew data (Gingrich not so good). Ron Paul has done well on the blogosphere, but not as well in the MSM, while Herman Cain’s coverage has perked up considerably. Hagen quotes Newsweek analyst Jonathan Alter:

…Over the last 2½ years, Obama never got a honeymoon, if you actually look back into the early days of his presidency. He got very positive press on the first day, and he’s been in the scrum ever since…The truth about the American media is that we have gone, over the last 15 years, from something that could accurately be called a dominant liberal media — through the period of American liberalism, from the end of World War II to the founding of Fox News in 1996 — to a dominant conservative media in this country.

Moreover, President Obama is taking plenty of heat from the left flank inside his party, so the cumulative criticism is cited by both the left and right as proof of his growing unpopularity. Yet he still does much better in opinion polls than the Republican Party and surprisingly well in head-to-head horse race polls, considering the current economic situation.
Hagen closes with an inconclusive discussion about whether it is good strategy to attack the media for bias. But what remains clear is that conservative whining about ‘liberal media bias’ won’t find any verification in the best data out there.

Recent events ranging from the massive recall and repeal campaigns in Wisconsin and Ohio, the protests in the streets of downtown New York and the broad progressive coalition meeting in Washington to jump-start the “American Dream” movement have all dramatically raised progressives’ hopes that a new independent progressive movement might be emerging – one that will be able to successfully challenge the hold of Fox News and the Tea Party on ordinary Americans.
The hard and inescapable reality, however, is that any progressive organizing effort will quickly find itself grinding to a halt if it does not honestly and immediately confront a critical problem – the existence of two profoundly condescending and deeply destructive assumptions about ordinary working Americans that are widespread in the progressive world.
The assumptions are these:

1. That progressives naturally understand the “real” issues that face ordinary Americans without having the need to do any serious “field” research to find out how ordinary people themselves define, understand and think about the issues.
2. That ordinary working Americans are basically gullible and can be easily manipulated by the messages they get from the media.

In combination, these two assumptions repeatedly sabotage all progressive attempts to build an independent social movement that gains the support of ordinary working Americans.
Stated this bluntly, most progressives would quite indignantly deny that they actually hold these two views. But these opinions are rarely expressed this directly. Instead, they operate as unstated and often unrecognized underlying assumptions behind other kinds of assertions that are far more widespread.
An example
A recent Huffington Post article presented a typical example of how these views are expressed in progressive commentary.
Here is how the article expresses the first assumption – that progressives already know what ordinary Americans consider the “real issues” without needing any data:

[Democrats] have become convinced by the new conventional wisdom in Washington, that Americans aren’t really concerned as much about jobs as they are about the deficit. If you stop and think about it for a moment, that notion is absurd on the face of it. Is it really possible that Americans who have lost their jobs or fear losing them are more worried about an abstraction — the budget deficit in Washington — than about the realities of their lives — that they face a budget deficit around their own kitchen table at the end of every month when they’re trying to pay their rent or make their mortgage payment on their rapidly depreciating home?

Set aside for a moment the verbal sleight of hand by which “Americans” in one sentence becomes “Americans who have lost their jobs or fear losing them” in the next. The article’s implicit argument is that “common sense” alone is sufficient to prove that the American people can never genuinely view deficits to be of equal importance to unemployment. The alternative can be summarily dismissed as “absurd”
Polls or other empirical data, on the other hand, can simply be “rigged” to provide any answer the pollster wants.

Can a pollster who believes or wants to show that Americans are as or more concerned about the national debt than jobs or the economic insecurity they face every day write questions in such a way as to get what he or she is looking for? Sure. Does this reflect what working and middle class Americans feel as they watch their economic security disappear? Not in a million years.

Many progressives will be deeply attracted to this point of view on an emotional level. But when one steps back to view it more dispassionately it becomes clear that the basic assumption underlying this line of argument is that progressives can know what ordinary Americans consider the “real issues” they face by a process of simple introspection and logic. Data is unnecessary because any alternative hypothesis can be summarily dismissed as “absurd on the face of it” and could not be true “in a million years”
This view has its roots in the post-World War II conviction among both progressives and Democrats that, as the advocates and representatives of the “ordinary guys” and “Average Joe’s” of the 50’s, they were naturally able to understand the “real” — essentially “kitchen table” economic — interests of working people and reliably distinguish between the “real” issues working people faced and the social and cultural issues that conservatives continually exploited to manipulate them. A recent and particularly lyrical version of this “real issues” versus “false consciousness” notion was expressed in Thomas Frank’s 2004 book “What’s the Matter with Kansas”
The problem with this perspective is that it too easily leads to the rather arrogant notion that progressives can “know” what working people really want and care about by a process of deduction from what are defined as their “real interests” rather than through open-minded field research and investigation.

Read more…

Jonathan Weisman’s report on “the surging Hispanic population in several states that figure to be crucial to the outcome of next year’s election” in the Wall St. Journal comes as welcome news to President Obama. As Weisman explains:

In Florida, the nation’s largest presidential swing state, the voting-age Hispanic population grew by nearly 250,000 people between 2008 and 2010, census data show. By contrast, the voting-age white population grew by 30,400.
Nevada added more than 44,000 voting-age Hispanics over the same period, more than double the increase of 18,000 voting-age whites. And in New Mexico, the voting-age Hispanic total rose by more than 36,000, outpacing the growth among whites of just over 19,000.
Mr. Obama won all three states in 2008–and two-thirds of Hispanic voters nationwide…He won North Carolina…by more than 14,000 votes. About 54,400 additional voting-age Hispanics have come to the state between 2008 and 2010, census data show.
…The Census Bureau reported Wednesday that Latinos made up 7% of voters in 2010, the highest percentage for a nonpresidential election since the bureau began collecting such data.

As one of the impressive companion graphics to Weisman’s article, the WSJ provides an instructive chart “Targeting the Hispanic Vote, State-by-State,” which anyone interested in Latino voter turnout should peruse for a few minutes.
Maria Cardona’s HuffPo article cited in J.P. Green’s Wednesday post addressed some of the GOP’s huge liabilities in campaigning for Latino votes. Weisman adds,

Mr. Obama may have one thing going for him: By huge majorities, Hispanic voters favor immigration bills that have languished since the Bush administration, and they largely blame the GOP for their failure, according to a new poll of Hispanic voters by Resurgent Republic
…Many Latinos read the GOP’s call for tough illegal immigration laws as an affront…Republican front-runners Mitt Romney and Rick Perry have sparred at debates over a law the Texas governor signed granting in-state university tuition to illegal immigrants.
Mr. Romney has called the law a magnet for illegal immigration. When Mr. Perry suggested at a recent debate that the law’s critics had no heart, the backlash among conservative voters was harsh.

And according to a Republican-commissioned poll,

Resurgent Republic asked Hispanics in Florida, Colorado and New Mexico whether they agreed that the best way to improve the economy was to increase government investment in job training, education and infrastructure, or by reining in government spending, lowering taxes and reducing excessive regulations.
In Colorado, a swing state, 56% sided with more government spending, as Mr. Obama has proposed, while 37% sided with less government, as Republicans propose. In Florida, the spread was 52% to 40%. In New Mexico, it was 59%-30%.

But there are also serious problems concerning Latino support for the President, as Wesiman explains. According Wall Street Journal/NBC News surveys, Obama’s August 2011 approval rating was down 14 percent among Latinos since June 2009. And some swing states have added more whites than Latinos. Further:

…Hispanic unemployment stands at 11.3%, higher than the 9.1% rate for the nation as a whole. And the president has failed to deliver a promised overhaul of immigration laws that would include a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

Weisman reports that the GOP is already running ads in Spanish on TV and Radio.
Dems have set up phone banks in NM and NV and canvassing in Hispanic suburban neighborhoods. President Obama spoke at a heavilly Hispanic Denver high school and the White House has already conducted an on-line roundtable on issues of concern to the Latino community. Weisman reports that “his re-election campaign is recruiting Latino neighborhood captains, canvassing coordinators, phone-bank hosts and data-management coordinators.”
Weisman didn’t discuss the possible effects of GOP voter suppression initiatives, like new identification requirements in some states, which will likely reduce Latino votes. Dems hope the laws will backfire and energize Hispanic voters to support Democratic candidates across the ballot.

Of all the dumb manufactured “threats” that have circulated via email and talk radio in recent years, one of the dumbest has been the repeated claim that evil bureaucrats or evil socialist politicians were on the very brink of suppressing conservative religious or secular opinions via a hoary regulation called the “Fairness Doctrine.”
For the uninitiated, the Fairness Doctrine is a relic of the 1950s and 1960s–a period when broadcast television and radio dominated American media to an extraordinary degree. The idea was that broadcasters had an obligation to present diverse points of view in their editorial expressions, meaning that in fairly egregious cases of imbalance, free time had to be offered to contrary opinions. It was never much enforced, but was bitterly resented, as you might imagine, by station owners and networks.
The Fairness Doctrine was formally repudiated by the Federal Communications Commission in 1987. The occasional politician–usually a Democrat–has talked about bringing it back, generally to rattle the cages of the talk radio industry with its complete domination by conservatives. There has been no serious threat to do so, however. And the lion’s share of the hysteria over the Fairness Doctrine has been since Barack Obama’s election, even though he made it abundantly clear during the 2008 campaign and afterwards that he opposed restoration of the Doctrine. Kevin Drum has helpfully offered up the results of a google image search of the subject, which harvested a large number of conservative cartoons inveighing against the totalitarian designs of godless liberals to use the Doctrine to suppress poor Rush and poor Sean Hannity and poor Glenn Beck, brave and helpless souls that they are. Anyone with an email account and conservative friends (or conservative friends of friends) has probably gotten alarmist messages on this same subject, many of them emanating from religious conservatives claiming the Doctrine is about to be used to ban Christian broadcasting altogether.
Yesterday the FCC expunged every vestige of the Fairness Doctrine from its regulations. Will this finally tamp down the conspiracy theories about the ongoing assault on the rights of conservatives to express their opinions? Probably not.

As progressive frustration with Obama has mounted, the plaintive assertion that “If Obama had just used the “bully pulpit” of the presidency he could have transformed the national debate” has become one of the most widely repeated criticisms of his administration. In hundreds of op-ed pieces, articles, blog posts, comment threads and e-mail letters to the editor his failure to use the bully pulpit to dominate the airwaves with a full-throated progressive position on issue after issue is cited as the major and indeed single most important reason for the increased influence of Republican views.
The issue goes far beyond Obama or 2010 or 2012. If the bully pulpit view is correct, an uncompromising progressive should be able to dramatically shift the national debate once he or she is elected. If it is not, he or she will find that the bully pulpit is a relatively limited tool that cannot dramatically shift public attitudes. The issue is whether the bully pulpit actually “works” as described or if it doesn’t. This is just as critical a question for a future president Krugman or Olbermann as it is for the present occupant of the oval office.
What is particularly striking about the “the bully pulpit can transform the national debate” notion is the way it is stated as if it were an entirely self-evident truth, one whose validity is so obvious that it does not need any empirical support or confirmation. In virtually every case, it is presented as a proposition whose certainty is simply beyond any serious question.
In fact, however, there is actually very little evidence in either the historical record or public opinion research to support this view. Even such famous examples of presidential rhetoric as Lyndon Johnson’s “We shall overcome” speech supporting the Civil Rights Bill or Ronald Reagan’s often quoted speech asserting that “government is the problem not the solution” did not produce any major epiphany-like transformations of attitudes that opinion polls could detect. Observation suggests that the bully pulpit has a real and to some degree quantifiable but very clearly limited influence on public opinion. It cannot, by itself, produce major attitude change.
The tremendous appeal of the “bully pulpit” notion is rooted in the fact that it provides an all-purpose, entirely irrefutable argument against Obama’s (or any politician’s) political strategy and tactics without requiring any evidence.
To be sure, presidential rhetoric does indeed have a specific, identifiable degree of influence on public opinion. In recent months there have been two relatively clear examples of this – Obama’s speech criticizing Paul Ryan’s Medicare proposal and his call last week for public pressure on Congress in support of a compromise on the debt ceiling. In the first case Obama’s remarks clearly served as a focal point that helped crystallized public opposition to the Ryan plan and his call for pressure on congress last week produced a wave of phone calls that overloaded the congressional switchboard.
But these same two examples also suggest the very clear limitations that exist on the influence of presidential rhetoric. Such rhetoric can help to focus and rally public opinion around a position that already commands strong and widespread popular support or it can mobilize action among dedicated partisans. But there are no solid examples – either recently or in the last several decades — of presidential speeches ever actually producing major transformations of deeply held public attitudes.
When this is suggested to proponents of the “If only Obama had used the bully pulpit he could have transformed the national debate” view, however, they will emphatically deny that it is true. On the contrary, proponents generally launch into what a skeptical listener cannot help but perceive as a series of ex-post-facto rationalizations designed to protect the notion that any Democratic president who genuinely wants to can indeed use the bully pulpit to dominate and control the national debate on any issue.

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Last week Rick Perry, said by all to be on the very brink of a presidential campaign, surprised most observers by not only shrugging off New York’s decision to legalize gay marriage, but suggesting people in other states ought to mind their own damn business:

Our friends in New York six weeks ago passed a statute that said marriage can be between two people of the same sex. And you know what? That’s New York, and that’s their business, and that’s fine with me. That is their call. If you believe in the 10th Amendment, stay out of their business.

After a few days of squawking from Christian Right leaders, Perry decided to execute a full flip-flop in a venue most likely to be understood as a capitulation to his theocratic friends: a radio interview by the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins. Get a load of this exchange after Perkins questioned Perry’s earlier statement:

GOV. PERRY: Let me just, I probably needed to add a few words after “that’s fine with me” its fine with me that the state is using their sovereign right to decide an issue. Obviously gay marriage is not fine with me, my stance had not changed. I believe marriage is a union between one man and one woman….
TONY PERKINS: But when you look at what’s happening on marriage, the real fear is that states like New York will change the definition of marriage for Texas. At that point the states rights argument is lost….
GOV. PERRY: Right and that is the reason that the federal marriage amendment is being offered, it’s that small group of activist judges, and frankly a small handful, if you will, of states, and liberal special interests groups that intend on a redefinition of, if you will, marriage on the nation, for all of us, which I adamantly oppose.
Indeed to not pass the federal marriage amendment would impinge on Texas, and other states not to have marriage forced upon us by these activist judges and special interest groups….
TONY PERKINS: Governor, we are about out of time but I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but I think I hear what you are saying. The support given what’s happening across the nation, the fear of the courts, the administration’s failure to defend the defense of marriage act.
The only and thin line of protection for those states that have defined marriage, that have been historically been defined between a man and a woman. The support of a marriage amendment is a pro-state’s rights position, because it will defend the rights of states to define marriage as it has been.
GOV. PERRY: Yes sir, and I have long supported the appointment of judges who respect the constitution and the passage of a federal marriage amendment. That amendment defines marriage between one man and one woman, and it protects the states from being told otherwise.

Pretty amazing, eh? You need a constitutional amendment to protect Texas’ right to tell New York it’s wrong on same-sex marriage, or something like that. Perkins’ assertion that “a marriage amendment is a pro-state’s rights position, because it will defend the rights of states to define marriage as it has been,” perfectly illustrates the instrumental attitude the Christian Right has towards the supposedly revered U.S. Constitution. They’ll toss it aside in a New York Minute if it gets in the way of achieving their objectives.
It’s kind of funny, if grotesque, to watch Perry anxiously negotiate his way through the humiliation and illogic of this blatant flip-flop under Perkins’ guidance. But it’s yet another reminder that those who think the Christian Right’s power in the Republican Party is a thing of the past really just aren’t paying much attention.