Thanks to Rex Hammock for pointing to these 9/11 memorial photos on Flickr:
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Monthly Archives: September 2012
The Battle for the Southern, White, Evangelical, Working Class Vote
Reuters has an interesting article about the challenges Romney and Obama face with lower income whites in the south. Let's just say that being rich and Mormon complicates things for Romney:
Reuters/Ipsos polling data compiled over the past several months shows that, across the Bible Belt, 38 percent of these voters said they would be less likely to vote for a candidate who is "very wealthy" than one who isn't. This is well above the 20 percent who said they would be less likely to vote for an African-American…
According to Reuters/Ipsos polling data, however, 35 percent of voters overall, and the same proportion of lower- and middle-income white Bible Belt voters, say they would be less likely to vote for a candidate who is Mormon.
Even the fact that a (rather shocking) number of Republicans believe President Obama to be a Muslim (the horrors!) is somewhat offset by Romney being a Mormon:
In a survey conducted this summer by the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion and Public Life, almost a third of Republicans said they believe Obama is Muslim, compared with 16 percent of independents and 8 percent of Democrats. The falsehood is a frequent theme of conservative talk radio.
Still, the challenge for the GOP is to ensure that white evangelicals, most of whom voted for other candidates in the primary, are sufficiently enthusiastic about Romney to make it to the polls…
In 2008, Parrish was a fan of former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, who was defeated in the GOP primary. She counts him as a Facebook friend. She has yet to "friend" Romney, although she plans to vote for him.
"I'm not extremely excited," she confessed. "I'd prefer not to have a Mormon."
Nonetheless, she added, "Romney seems to align himself with conservative values."
Long story short, what would normally have been a slam dunk demographic for a Republican in 2012 ain't necessarily so. The Republicans certainly did themselves no favor by nominating a rich Mormon with the charisma of stale Wonder Bread.
myWinston-Salem.com
The folks behind Winston-Salem-based Contract Web Development just announced the launch of Cover Story Media, an online publishing company "that focuses on original content founded in reader engagement." One of their products is mywinston-salem.com and after taking a quick trip around the site I'd say it looks like a good new player in the local online content game.
Congrats to tennis buddy Alex Schenker and his team on their new venture. Here's a video they created for the launch.
Pooplant
So what could sound worse than a fecal transplant? A DIY fecal transplant at home:
Dr. Khoruts decided his patient needed a transplant. But he didn’t give her a piece of someone else’s intestines, or a stomach, or any other organ. Instead, he gave her some of her husband’s bacteria. [He] mixed a small sample of her husband’s stool with saline solution and delivered it into her colon.
The transplant was a success — the patient’s diarrhea cleared up within a day and did not return… Khortus was able to demonstrate that we can move colonies of microorganisms from one person to another.
With an estimated 10,000 different species of bacteria living in our bodies, and with bacteria outnumbering cells ten to one, this discovery may have implications for health care more generally. And if the fecal transplant treatment is any indicator, it could lead to fewer doctors’ visits, too. Why is that? Because as this scientific study notes, bacteriotherapy for CDI can be done at home.
Collapse of the Authority-Media Complex
Eric Garland has written a thought-provoking piece about why the celebrity "big-thinkers" are starting to be called on the carpet:
It would be positively idiotic to somehow blame Messieurs Lehrer, Gladwell, Zakaria, Ferguson and others like them for the hot mess of American leadership over the last couple decades. However, their brand of “thought leadership,” it must be said, did wonderfully in a world of authority for its own sake. People still needed to feel as if they were talking to somebody who knew what was going on, lest they sink into a horrific depression realizing that nearly all sectors of American leadership failed catastrophically all at once. Media properties were looking for towering figures who could stand up across a wide variety of platforms, as billions of dollars of content sales were now concentrated into the hands of a few companies: Disney, Time Warner, News Corp, CBS, and others who owned publishers, TV, radio and more. Speaking agencies had to fill keynote spots for the billions of dollars of conferences held every year, and having superstars is a way easier sale than actually finding the right speaker for each occasion. (You want to talk international security? Great, here’s Thomas Friedman. You want to talk international business competition? Great, here’s Thomas Friedman. You want to talk about renewing American potential? Have you heard of Thomas Friedman? He’s very influential, you know. Only $50,000, too.)
If you notice the career arcs of those who attained success against the teeth-gritting backdrop of constant leadership failures, you’ll notice that none of these high-minded intellectuals tend to rock the boat too much. Gladwell, for example, has been pre-eminent in the world of publishing for more than a decade, a period of time covering all of the collapse of character and values I have described above. Can you name a single controversial opinion the man has taken? Has he ever gotten up in the grill of anyone who might hesitate before shelling out his $75,000 speaking fee? I actually think Gladwell is a good writer, but as far as the paragon of intellectual virtue in the Western world for the last decade, shouldn’t some part of the last decade’s clusterfuck have struck him as worthy of spending a little built-up credibility and inspired him to call some people out on the carpet? I don’t mean a Network/Howard Beale cri-de-coeur, I mean maybe some minor article recognizing the dramatic drop in results from our leadership, something in tune with the times. Lord knows he could have always regained some ground with a nice book on how people get successful. Fear of starvation was not holding him back.
The piece is pretty extensive and Garland does a great job of looking back at the last 30-ish years to explain how we came to this point in our culture where we are being led by folks who really don't know what they're talking about, much less what they're doing.
The Incredible Shrinking Middle
One of the underexplored aspects of the current unemployment situation in North Carolina is the movement of people from adequate paying jobs to under paying jobs. A study by the NC Justice Center makes it vividly clear:
The nonprofit group determined there were 356,000 more working-age adults employed in the state in 2001 than in 2010, with manufacturing taking the brunt of the job decline.
The state lost 380,000 jobs in that period, with about 75 percent concentrated in industries with average hourly wages that enabled individuals and families to stay above the living income standard. A family of four needed to earn at least $23.47 an hour in 2010 to have enough money to meet basic expenses, according to N.C. state government standards.
The state's manufacturing workforce, which paid an average of $25.30 an hour, fell by 38 percent during the 10-year period. Manufacturing accounted for 72 percent of the state's job losses…
Where North Carolina did have job growth, it mostly came in low-wage industry sectors, the group said. About 83 percent of the job growth came with average wages of less than the $23.47-an-hour living income standard for a family of four.
For example, 15 percent of the state's job growth from 2001 to 2010 came in the food-services and accommodation sectors, which paid $7.15 an hour.
The state's median household income dropped 9.4 percent during the decade, or from $47,823 in 2001 to $43,326 in 2010.
The center found the number of North Carolinians living in poverty – $22,314 annual income for a family of four – rose by 24.1 percent during the decade.
In a nutshell the middle class is shrinking, and not from upward mobility. You would think that would lead to an outcry against the "corporate class," but outside of a little wrist-slapping at the height of the economic meltdown it just hasn't happened. That's what makes this interview of Mike Lofgren by Bill Moyers so easy to believe (h/t Fec for the link). For those of you expecting an anti-Republican screed you'll be disappointed – he basically argues that both parties have been captured by the corporate class. Enjoy:
Charlotte During DNC Sounds Like the Triad During Furniture Market
In the months before moving with my family to Lewisville, NC in 2004 I decided to take a couple of road trips down from Washington to check out the business environment in the Piedmont Triad. I'd never had trouble getting a room before so I didn't think to make a reservation, which was a huge mistake the time I made the trip the same week that the Furniture Market was in full swing in High Point. Let's just say I ended up staying in a motel where I suspect I was the only person who didn't pay by the hour.
Apparently finding a room in Charlotte during the Democratic National Convention is a similar experience:
All these political reporters have been complaining about the boring staged political conventions for weeks, but when presented with the opportunity to talk to a real live victim of the "Obama economy" — a hooker — they run away screaming. The National Review's John Fund explains that one of their political reporters was forced to request a hotel change after the Democratic National Convention assigned the reporter to a seedy Charlotte hotel that might have had a hooker working in the parking lot. Fund quotes his colleague anonymously:
The Knights Inn was the worst hotel I have ever seen, and I’ve stayed in many bad motels in my life. Two guys were dealing drugs in the room next to me, and a prostitute was working out of the parking lot. And this was in the early afternoon. The room itself was dirty, full of other people’s stuff, etc.
I have never requested a hotel change in 3 years at NR. This was the first time I felt absolutely compelled.
A Wilderness of Error
A new book about the Jeffrey MacDonald case is sure to generate some keen interest here in North Carolina. Based on this review at Head Butler it sounds like a fascinating read.
Befuddled 