Would you buy a used lobbyist from this man?

Mitt Romney was challenged by a reporter when he claimed that "lobbyists don't run my campaign." Here's the facts on the ground: Romney has accepted the second most money from lobbyists of any Republican presidential candidate; he has received the most endorsements from lobbyists of any Republican presidential candidate; a registered lobbyist is one of his senior advisers. A lot of his "advising" comes from lobbyists.

What happened after the spat (see the video) demonstrated why American journalism has become so abysmal. Glen Johnson, the reporter who called Romney on his b.s., was berated by Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom, who claimed that "arguing" with the person giving a press conference is not "professional"!

It is not surprising that someone wanting to get a message reported his way defines the "profession" of journalism as "repeating whatever you are told." Fehrnstrom works for Romney; it's his job to get Romney's message reported Romney's way. That doesn't even upset me. Freedom of speech means that lying scumbags have the right to lie their scumbags off.

What upsets me is that all too many "journalists" follow the same definition of "objective journalism": "It isn't up to me to think about what's being said, only to parrot it." Journalists aren't supposed to work for the people they report on, they are supposed to work for the people they report TO. Us.

Come to think of it, I will have to qualify that. Some "journalists" work for the people who listen to them by giving them what they want to hear. Most of the people who cheered for Glen Johnson's "watchdog journalism" didn't check out his documentation; they believed what he said because it matches what they believe about Mitt Romney, so it has to be true. The people who agree that Glen Johnson acted unprofessionally won't be checking out his documentation, because what he said doesn't matches what they believe about Mitt Romney, so it can't be true. To those people, Ann Coulter is a journalist. She gives them what they want to hear.

Freedom of speech does not mean you have the right to lie without being challenged. And freedom of information does not mean that you have the right to pick and choose your information based on what you want the truth to be. Whether what we read is unflattering to a person we support or favorable toward someone we oppose, we have a responsibility to try to disprove our initial opinion before we decide its credibility. That is what "being objective" requires.

When you choose to be lied to, you have surrendered freedom. When you subject yourself to the rudeness of being proved wrong, you make yourself free.









Would you buy a used lobbyist from this man?

Barack Obama for Me

I've been torn for several months. Looking at the total positions of the candidates, the top four I was in agreement with, in order of ranking, were:

1. Kucinich
2. Gravel
3. Obama
4. Edwards

Of them all, Edwards seemed to be the only one directly addressing an issue very critical to me -- the wealth gap and how it shreds society and undercuts democracy; the spread of poverty in America and how many men, women AND children are being left behind and thrown away.

I donated a few bucks to Edwards each month for about a year and kept rooting for him. I think he has helped keep that issue from being ignored, even while so many people want to ignore it.

Even more than Obama's win in Iowa, his victory speech won a lot of us over. As one commentator said, "He didn't speak as a presidential candidate; he spoke as a President." Maybe I don't agree with him about absolutely everything, as I do with Dennis Kucinich. [*] If we're looking for a President who can pull a divided country together again after all the polarizing effects of the last eight years -- including the war and the wealth gap -- I think Obama's our best hope in the bunch.

I guess this is my Dear John letter. I'm going with Obama.

And even though Edwards and Richardson are the next closest to me on the Political Compass, I think Joe Biden would be a better pick as VP. He has at least some foreign policy experience; although "experience" isn't all that Hillary tries to make it out to be. I'll pick someone who has succeeded over someone who has failed; I'll pick someone who has failed and learned from it over someone who has never tried; but I'll pick someone who has never tried over someone who has failed and NOT learned from it.

Take the Electoral Compass Quiz

More on Barack Obama's Political Positions

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* I may not agree with Dennis Kucinich about UFOs.

Ron Paul Polarization

I've seen passionate pro-Ron Paul and passionate anti-Ron Paul stories from liberals, and I've written a few myself.

I have talked with some intelligent, thoughtful Ron Paul supporters who say, "Yes, I disagree with him on abortion, etc; but we need a voice in the arena speaking about reigning in executive power, ending the war, and restoring civil rights." What worries me is the uncritical zealotry of so many of the Ron Paul supporters: "If you are for freedom, you are for Ron Paul; if you are against Ron Paul, you are against freedom!" Polarization kills brain cells. Uncritical support of ANYBODY is always dangerous.

Polarization against -- unconditional enmity -- also kills brain cells. Most of Ron Paul's supporters and most of Ron Paul's critics share common concerns. Instead of attacking Ron Paul, I think we should be presenting alternatives to accomplish the same goals: stop the war, reign in executive power, restore civil liberties.

Personally, I don't think that ANYBODY can "make you free." If individual citizens take more responsibility for our civic life, participate in our local government, get involved in our neighborhoods, we will make ourselves free. A President can only make that easier, or make it harder -- not do it for us. Bush made it harder. I think Ron Paul would make it harder, too -- and anybody else acting on Ron Paul's agenda. Kucinich, Gravel, Obama or Edwards would make it easier.

But NONE of them can do it for us. Yelling for a demagogue who will "make us free" is how countries get dictators.

And dictatorship is only helped by intellectuals who sneer at the "mob" and don't understand the desperation that drives them.

Senator Sessions Jumps the Shark

Two of the first news reports I saw today made me very happy: a Federal Judge declared White House visitor logs are public documents (cnn.com) and Sen. Harry Reid Pulled the FISA Telecom Immunity Bill Off the Senate Floor.

Score two for the U.S. Constitution!

Then I read a quote that sent a chill up my spine. During the debate before Reid pulled the bill, Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama said, “The civil libertarians among us would rather defend the constitution than protect our nation’s security.” (emphasis added)

Just in case anyone needs a reminder, U.S. Senators take an oath to support the Constitution! If you vote in Alabama, please remind your Senator of his oath.

The Rise of the Raging Moderates

Recent conversations I have had with Ron Paul supporters and critics have reminded me all over again why the human species should be reclassified Homo Wannabe-Sapiens.

It isn't that we are all stupid; most people who even know who Ron Paul is are extremely intelligent. That's including both those who consider him the Savior of His Country and those who consider him the latest sign of the Downfall of Civilization.

What makes us Homo Wannabe-Sapiens is how readily we polarize like that. Polarized people can't learn from each other, because they can no longer see any strengths in the other person's argument or any weaknesses in their own. Polarized people don't even seem able to tell the difference between a physical fact and an ideological plank.

This all reminded me of an essay I wrote back in May, when I decided I was a Raging Moderate:

The Rise of the Raging Moderates

The title of one of Jim Hightower's books is There's Nothing in the Middle of the Road but Yellow Lines and Dead Armadillos. The attitude is generally shared even by those on the opposite extreme from Hightower: to be "moderate" means that you don’t believe in, or stand for, anything very strongly.

There is another definition of "moderate." A moderate is interested in solving a problem, not in winning a debate. A moderate places the common good above what is good for any one political party or any other faction. A moderate cares about people and doesn't give much of a fig for ideology. A moderate can see faults in allies and virtues in opponents. Like anyone else, a moderate thinks he's right, or he'd be thinking something else already; but a moderate is willing to find out he's wrong, and change his mind, if the evidence warrants it. A moderate is able to step out of his own viewpoint long enough to listen to and understand a different one. A moderate knows that honest people can honestly disagree, and still have common goals and interests that they can work on together.

A moderate can get angry. A moderate can get tired of being whipsawed between extremists, and say "a pox on ALL your houses!"

The founders of the American system of government spent a lot of time and great intellectual effort on how to forestall any one group, on whatever extreme, from gaining all power and running away with it. They divided and distributed power among different branches and levels of government so that in any conflicts, neither a majority nor a minority could ride roughshod over everyone else; we would all have to negotiate with the people who disagree with us.

And ever since then, extremists have tried to erode that balance of powers and collect all control in the hands of those who see things their way.

Polarization shuts down brain cells. (See Michael Shermer's article in Scientific American: The Political Brain.) The more people you see as your enemies, the more easily manipulated you are by your "friends." Fortunately, both polarized extremes of American politics seem to be losing their credibility. More and more elections depend on the vote of independents who are not arbitrarily aligned left OR Right – who have to be convinced case by case. Less and less independents are stampeded by being told that one party is the one and only force for Good and one party is the one and only force for Evil. An increasing number of voters demand practical results in domestic tranquility, common defense, and general welfare, instead of bigger and louder political slogans.

Books like Jim Hightower's (and, on the other end, Ann Coulter's diatribes about Godless Liberals) are hot sellers these days. On a promising note, so are these:

• Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America presents evidence that the supposed polarized culture is a myth, perpetuated by politicians and the media for their own purposes.
  

• In One Nation, After All : What Americans Really Think About God, Country, Family, Racism, Welfare, Immigration, Homosexuality, Work, The Right, The Left and Each Other, Alan Wolfe analyzes an extensive series of interviews across the county to find that we agree on more than we disagree.
  

• Edward Brooke, the first black U.S. senator since Reconstruction and a Republican elected from the liberal and Democratic state of Massachusetts, has written an autobiography, Bridging the Divide: My Life, covering four decades of American politics.
  

• John Avlon, author of Independent Nation: How Centrism Can Change American Politics, argues that centrism, "the rising political force in modern American life," also offers the best chance for America to prosper.
  

• Barbara Sinclair documents the genesis and consequences of increasing partisan polarization in national policy in Party Wars: Polarization And the Politics of National Policy Making.
  

• Senator John Danforth has directly confronted the combination of religious and poltical polarization with Faith and Politics: How the "Moral Values" Debate Divides America and How to Move Forward Together.
  

I would like to paraphrase Senator Danforth in a word to the Moderate Majority:

For a long time, the Radical Right & Radical Left have chanted their messages incessantly, while everyone else disdained the tactic of repetition, repetition, repetition. It is time for a clear statement of what we believe, a statement we repeat relentlessly and a statement that expresses the strength of our convictions:

• We believe in government of the people, for the people, and by the people, for the common good – not a government of cliques and cronies who sacrifice the welfare of the many to the profit of the few.
  

• We believe that all human beings are fallible, including ourselves; therefore no human being has the right of authority over another's conscience. The power of law should only limit the actions of individuals to the extent necessary to preserve the equal rights of all.
  

• We believe that government by the people must and will embrace conflicting opinions, even on hot-button issues, even of people with whom we vehemently disagree.
  

Citizens who support the common good over ideological partisanship should express ourselves clearly and forcefully as the alternative to those who favor divisiveness.

Earlier in this article I referred to brain research showing that partisan political responses involve areas of the brain dealing with emotion, not any of those dealing with cognition. Emotion is, of course, part of all of us. Emotion is not grit in the gears of human intelligence, it is an integral part of reasoning. If you had no emotions, you could make no decisions: you would have no preferences, no priorities, and all choices would be equal. A moderate is as emotional, as passionate about values and principles, as any partisan.

According to other brain research, the thinking of teenagers is dominated by the emotional circuits of the brain, and part of the maturation process is the cerebral circuits becoming increasingly active. The emotional circuits are never completely cut out of the thinking process; in what we call more mature thinking, however, the cerebral circuits play the dominant role.

A moderate is as emotional, as passionate about values and principles, as any partisan. A moderate, however, can still think, and listen, even when passionate.

Perhaps it is time for us all to just grow up.

Watch "Cheney's Law" Exposed On Frontline Tonight!

TONIGHT - Tuesday, October 16, 2007 - Frontline reports on Vice President Dick Cheney's three-decade, "secretive, behind-closed-doors campaign to give the president virtually unlimited wartime power." Please: see it, digg it, blog it, buzz it, shout it!

George Bush Knows Exactly When to Say "Democrat Party"

On the October 15, 2007 "Daily Show" Tony Snow downplayed Bush's reference to the "Democrat Party" as an example of how our dear boy Bush just gets his tongue tangled sometimes. In 2004, Bush got his tongue tangled only in solidly Red states. Everywhere else, Bush always pronounced "Democratic Party" clearly.

The point is not that I find "Democrat Party" to be offensive. The point is that Bush intends it to be offensive, and knows that it fans hostility when he uses it. Tony Snow is just as hypocritical now as when he was being paid for it, and Bush's "uniter not a divider" pretense was never worth more the breath it took to push it.

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Blog Action Day: Building Bridges

Liberal, neoliberal, conservative, neoconservative, libertarian – as different as our politics may seem, in reality we all hold much the same values. (see The Moral Sense by James Q Wilson)

We prioritize values differently, and it can be frustrating when what you consider critically urgent is at the bottom of everybody else's list (while they "waste" time and money on something at the bottom of your own list). We also have different ideas about how to apply our common values, and it can come as a shock when someone you have long regarded as an ally suddenly opposes your project (like local Seattle environmentalists have split on the transportation proposition on this November's ballot).

It may be hard to remember, in the middle of frustration, that those differences are a good thing. If we had to all work on just one thing, the earth would probably be three miles deep in whales. Everybody loves whales, including me; but I do not love the idea of 6 billion people working 24/7 to save the whales. Somebody's got to take care of the other stuff. Fortunately, we all have different priorities.

It's also good that even when we have the same goals, we have different ideas on how to pursue them. None of us sees everything; viewing any subject from more than one viewpoint yields a fuller picture of a problem and a better approach to it than any one person can come up with alone. If everybody saw things exactly the same way, we’d all run over the same cliff that none of us spotted.

In the end result, it is good that we have individual differences – but only if we are willing to listen to each other, understand each other, work on combining our differences. Polarized debate strangles everybody's neurons. We all stop making progress toward our goals and turn our efforts to building our bunkers.

My personal plea on this October 15th, Blog Action Day, with fifteen thousand bloggers writing about environmental issues and millions of people reading those blogs, is that each of you:

1. read a blog by somebody you disagree with;
2. describe for yourself what they are actually saying;
3. keep redoing #2 until they agree that you understand them;
4. identify goals and values that you share;
5. find one thing you can work together on toward a common goal.

Here's what I see as 10 goals we all share in common:

1. The health, welfare, and education of children is important to all of us, both emotionally and practically.


2. Clean air, clean water, clean ground, safe and nutritious and sufficient food, are critical to the survival of all of us.


3. Life is highly adaptable, but thrives best within certain parameters of climate and resources. Maintaining and even expanding those parameters is therefore important to all of us.


4. Good public health is essential for the good personal health of all of us. This includes the health of plants and animals; most majorly damaging human plagues have originated in our livestock.


5. All living things are intricately interdependent in a complex biosphere human science is only beginning to understand. It is critical to our mutual survival to maintain the health of that biosphere, which includes its genetic diversity.


6. Trade, both in the free exchange of goods and services and the free exchange of ideas, has been a foundation of human prosperity and advancement. It is in the interests of all of us to protect an atmosphere for free and fair trade. That requires an atmosphere of equal rights enforced by law; a universal standard of justice. It requires protection and support of the weaker members of society so that all are equal in bargaining power in the marketplace and in the enforcement of contracts. The maintenance of equal trade, equal rights, and equal justice is therefore a common good, a common survival goal.


7. Accurate knowledge is a critical survival resource. Increasing our mutual knowledge, and policing error, is another common good. Increasing the knowledge and the critical and creative thinking skills of another is an increase of our own good. The passion over "intellectual" debates is understandable as being driven by survival instinct.


8. The most important factor to individual human survival, since we became social animals, is other human beings. The creation and maintenance of social bonds is important to all of us, whether we like thinking of it as something we need, or not. People do need people. We will all be better off by making sure that others have strong social bonds, as well as ourselves.


9. We are each unique, with unique gifts. Other people can see things, think of things, say things, make things that I do not, that I could not. It benefits me to appreciate and encourage the uniqueness of others. The increase of human creativity and individual expression is a common good.


10. An ethical culture, in which all people are treated as we ourselves would like to be treated, is important to all of us. Promoting an ethic of honesty, fairness, kindness, and compassion protects us personally from fraud, exploitation, abuse and neglect.

These are my observations of what people of all political stripes already act like we value, even when we don't do it successfully. These are survival goals that can bridge ideological divisions. They seem a good starting point for working together on practical projects and policies. And each of them are things we can each act on in our own small ways every day.