A couple of Guilford County, NC commissioners (both Democrats) are catching heat for going to the National Association of Counties’ annual conference in Hawaii. As you’d expect some of those applying the heat are leaders of the Guilford County Republicans.
Which makes the "Aloha, wish you were here" postcard that Paul Gibson (Democrat) sent to Billy Yow (Republican) kind of funny. Read about it and see a scan of the card here at the Inside Scoop.
Who knew, politicians with a sense of humor.
Anyone with kids can tell you what a challenge it is to teach your kids how to discern "truth" from "advertising." My kids went through a phase where every product they’d seen a commercial for was the "best" or the "coolest." It got really annoying when they would suggest a solution for a problem based on an ad that they’d seen.
"Dad, you should use Exxon for gas because it puts a tiger in your tank," my oldest said when he was about seven or eight as we hurtled down the road with fumes spewing from under my hood thanks to an oil leak. I haven’t liked Exxon since.
The problem has moved beyond advertising since the kids started doing projects for school. The first stop for any research is the web, and take it from me you don’t want to know what passes for historical information these days.
As an adult whose done a fair amount of research in my day it is relatively easy for me to separate legitimate info sources from the crackpots, but to a child operating without the same points of reference the job is imminently more difficult. I can look at a web page and within moments know that it’s a mainstream or "quality" source. But my kids don’t know Merriam Webster from a hole in the wall so they will give "Joe’s Dictionary Blog" the same weight as the venerable Webster.
Amazingly my kids’ frame of reference has grown exponentially in a very short time. I think my wife and I have succeeded in giving them an appropriately jaundiced view of the world (i.e. all advertisements are lies, and any product that appears on Nickelodeon the Cartoon Channel or any other kid station most likely causes cancer).
But the kids aren’t the only ones who sometimes struggle with the "truth vs. BS" question these days. With the kudzu-like spread of information sources beyond traditional media outlets we adults are also learning that we need to re-calibrate our own BS meters. That means we need to hone our critical thinking skills, and an article I read today called "Media/Political Bias" (Rhetorica) provides a great starting point.
I encourage you to read the whole thing, but here are some highlights:
"There is no such thing as an objective point of view.
No matter how much we may try to ignore it, human communication always takes place in a context,
through a medium, and among individuals and groups who are situated
historically, politically, economically, and socially. This state of affairs is
neither bad nor good. It simply is…Critical questions for detecting bias
- What is the author’s / speaker’s socio-political position? With what
social, political, or professional groups is the speaker identified?- Does the speaker have anything to gain personally from delivering the
message?- Who is paying for the message? Where does the message appear? What is the
bias of the medium? Who stands to gain?- What sources does the speaker use, and how credible are they? Does the
speaker cite statistics? If so, how were the data gathered, who gathered the
data, and are the data being presented fully?- How does the speaker present arguments? Is the message one-sided, or does
it include alternative points of view? Does the speaker fairly present
alternative arguments? Does the speaker ignore obviously conflicting
arguments?- If the message includes alternative points of view, how are those views
characterized? Does the speaker use positive words and images to describe
his/her point of view and negative words and images to describe other points
of view? Does the speaker ascribe positive motivations to his/her point of
view and negative motivations to alternative points of view?"
The author goes on to dig more specifically into the current debate on bias in the media, and makes a very strong argument for the fact that there is both liberal and conservative bias in the media (it depends on who you talk to), but that the stronger biases in media are commercial bias, temporal bias, visual bias, bad news bias, etc.
Anyway you might want to keep these questions in mind as you try to parse through the white noise that is modern info-communication and wonder whatever happened to Walter Cronkite and the certainty of "That’s the way it was…"
I’m sure many of you have heard of this site before, but it was new to me. OpenSecrets.org is a site that allows you to see what the President, members of Congress and political groups spent on their campaigns. You can search by candidate, party, state, etc.
Here are some numbers from the 2004 election overview:
Amount raised for House candidates: $696,293,352
Amount raised for Senate candidates: $488,899,357
Amount raised for Presidential candidates: $867,856,427
Total raised: $2,053,049,136
It’s just mind boggling.
Dana Blankenhorn writes a long piece on secular humanism that touches on many topics of interest in America right now. Intelligent design, the separation of church and state, science vs. belief, etc. As usual I don’t agree with some of what he says, do agree with much of it, and think alot because of it.
A couple of paragraphs really grabbed me. Here’s the first:
Faith is meaningless if it is compelled. If a soup kitchen feeds you,
then demands you pray to its God in order to take that soup, is your
prayer really worth anything? If a school demands your child recite a
specific prayer, to a specific God, at a specific time, in a specific
way, where is the God in that? Where is the faith in that child?
This paragraph provoked a tangential thought process that helped me articulate my problem with evangelism. It is this:
If you need to tell me, repeatedly, why your religion (notice I said religion, not God) is so great then my first instinct is to look for its weakness. On the other hand if while having lunch together I hear you talk about the wonderful experiences you’ve had while volunteering at your church’s soup kitchen, see your eyes light up when you talk about the great people you’ve met while building homeless shelters, sense the community you feel whenever you chaperone your church’s youth group trips, I see you as a representative of all that is good with your religion. I may not join (do I really need to for you to have fulfilled your evangelistic mission?) but I will come to believe that your church is a true community of good, of doing what God put you, us, on Earth to do.
The next part of Dana’s post that grabbed me was this:
America is also a nation of 10,000 faiths, all actively practiced, all loudly proclaimed.
We have Bahai and Buddhist temples, Shiite, Sunni and Black Muslims.
We have Maronite and Roman Catholics, Russian and Greek Orthodox. We
have Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform Jewish temples. We have a
wealth of faiths invented right here – Mormons and Southern Baptists –
as well as churches that get by merely on their ministers’ brand name…America is the most religious nation in the history of the planet.
We’re a Christian nation, but we are also a Buddhist one, and a Muslim
one, and a Hindu one. When God hears the prayers of America, he or she
hears dozens of languages, a great cacophony. And then there are the
atheists and agnostics who either don’t know God or don’t care.All this is worth cherishing. All this is worth savoring. All this
is worth protecting. This is our legacy, it’s what makes us special.
My thought tangent here diverted to the damage that the exclusionary aspect of many religions is doing to our society. If you’re not with us then you’re against us.
Those same people who stand there and proclaim the greatness of their religion also preach that their’s is the only way. If I, or you, do not join them we will not be saved. I will be excluded. I am an outsider.
This kind of thinking is human in that almost all people surround themselves with people like themselves. We fear people who are different. Unfortunately many leaders understand how to take advantage of this fear. They use this fear to manipulate us for their own ends, whether it be the furthering of their particular ideology or the gain of power and influence in the secular world.
As Dana points out, the true power of America is that we accept all faiths under our umbrella. We recognize each individual’s right to believe in their own religion, or to not have a religion. We are inclusive, not exclusive. We have overcome our natural fear of "others", although it has never happened quickly (ask the Irish and Italian immigrants of the late 19th and early 20th century).
America is definitely a nation of economic haves and have nots, but it is also a nation that has led the way in offering personal liberty. It is by nature an inclusive society.
My fear right now is of those leaders that would claim America for their particular faith. America is NOT a Christian nation, nor a Muslim nation, nor a Hindu nation. It is a nation that accepts all of these faiths and more. It is a scaffold that supports all religions and none.
To close the loop let me say this: I do not want to evangelize for America, for the same reason that I don’t want someone to evangelize their religion to me. I want to lead my life so that I can be a representative of what is good about America. I want my actions to speak for my belief.
I’m not a big fan of the sensationalist American political shows, from the right or left. I think Rush Limbaugh’s a blowhard and Al Franken, while sometimes funny, comes across as an ass. But Franken’s point in this post of the $8.8 billion that was mis-managed by the Coalition Provisional Authority, and how it completely disappeared as a legitimate "big story" is a valid one.
Unfortunately in the same post he also wonders (conjectures?) if all the security alerts in ’04 were politically motivated on behalf of the President’s re-election campaign. If not why haven’t there been any since the election?
It’s that kind of silliness that kills these extremists’ legitimacy with middle-of-the-roaders like me, and so we tend to miss their valid points. Too bad.
Doug Kenline just commented on a previous post to tell me about a little blog initiative he’s boilerplating here. Has some links to lawmakers who are currently blogging, and a stated mission to get all legislators in all 50 states blogging.
One observation: if audio blogging (i.e. Podcasting) really takes off you won’t have any problem getting any of these guys or gals involved. I think the only reason they aren’t all blogging already is that most of them either can’t type or have no idea now to use their computers beyond firing off memos using Word.
Congressman John Conyers, Jr. has his own blog, and from what I’ve seen it ain’t bad. He’s a Democrat from Michigan, so my conservative friends might not want to visit.
Now, how do we get our local politicians to start their own blogs?
I’ve often struggled with my political identity. I agree with some of the Democrats’ agenda and some of the Republicans’ agenda. And there’s the fact that I harbor a severe distrust of all politicians, no matter what their stripe. So if pressed I’d say I’m a cynical DemoPublican.
However, after reading this piece by Chris Nolan, I think I come closer to being a Progressive Libertarian than anything else. Unfortunately that’s the kind of name that gets parties marginalized, or at least confused with a party in Mexico or Italy.
Befuddled 