Category Archives: Random Blogging

Penny Wise, Pound Foolish

A friend from Wisconsin sometimes sends me clippings from his local papers that he thinks I will find interesting. The most recent was a perfect example of so much that’s wrong with our policymaking today: it told of a researcher at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who had been studying strains of the Ebola virus.

Just as his research was beginning to show promise–just as he and his team had created a potential vaccine– his funding was terminated. As the paper reported

The experiments demonstrated the vaccine, when administered in two doses, is effective even against the most deadly Ebola strains. That’s when the money ran out…Kawaoka could not proceed with tests to determine whether the vaccine regimen might work with humans.

I’m sure that those parceling out the ever-shrinking resources available for such studies figured Ebola was too abstract an issue–that scarce funds needed to be directed to research with more immediate application.

Whoops….

Researchers in all areas, including but certainly not limited to the sciences, have raised concerns over the dwindling of government resources for research and development. This lack of concern for investing in our continued progress, like our disinclination to maintain and improve our basic infrastructure, signals a country on the decline.

Who was it who said “The true meaning of life is to plant trees under whose shade you do not expect to sit”? Whether that is the meaning of individual lives may be up for debate–but concern for the long term and the willingness to invest in it absolutely must be a central precept for any nation that wishes to be–or remain–great.

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Their True Colors

If a couple of Facebook friends hadn’t posted about it, I’d have missed it.

“It” was the bigoted rant posted to Facebook by Charlotte Lucas, co-owner of Lucas Oil, whose family name adorns the largest structure in downtown Indianapolis. WRTV’s Rafael Sanchez was apparently the only journalist to report on Lucas’ post. According to WRTV:

“I’m sick and tired of minorities running our country!” Lucas wrote in the post. “As far as I’m concerned, I don’t think that atheists (minority), muslims [sic] (minority) nor any other minority group has the right to tell the majority of the people in the United States what they can and cannot do here. Is everyone so scared that they can’t fight back for what is right or wrong with his country?”

How charming.

It’s interesting to note that no other local media outlet saw fit to report on this unseemly rant by a privileged member of this community. (The Star spent its column inches on important things like “Ten things to do in Indy this weekend.”)

Perhaps the local media didn’t consider the whining of yet another self-absorbed white Christian “victim” newsworthy.

These self-pitying tantrums have never been rare, and since Obama’s election, their frequency has escalated. I’ve heard similar sentiments (albeit not quite so blatant) from otherwise nice, well-to-do people who claim to support “diversity,” who donate to all the “right” causes, and who would never fire-bomb a mosque or burn a cross on someone’s lawn.

There is a lot of resentment below those polished and privileged surfaces. You can almost hear the indignation: how dare those “minorities” lay claim to equal treatment? Don’t “they” know their place? For goodness sake, I have a Jewish lawyer and I give money to the Urban League–what more do they want?

People like Charlotte Lucas and Donald Sterling and Daniel Snyder and so many others don’t hear themselves–at least, they don’t hear themselves as the rest of us hear them–because they live in enclaves populated by the similarly-situated–people who are like-minded and perpetually aggrieved. In their world, they are the victims.

In ours, not so much.

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The Apocalypse Caucus

At Talking Points Memo, I came across a new–and very apt–term to describe the rabid members of the House GOP: the apocalypse caucus.

There is no doubt that members of this caucus are out of step with the vast majority of Americans–including the majority of Republicans. They are a small tail that is wagging a large and unhappy dog. Their ability to win election–and then pull their saner comrades to the far Right–is explained by a structural anomaly and what Bill Bishop has dubbed “The Big Sort.”

When 2015 rolls around, Steve King is going to have a lot more company. As the Republican House majority looks to add seats, both the House and the GOP caucus will shift rightward. The self-parodying display of conservatism required in red-district primary contests has resulted in a striking new crop of future members for the Apocalypse Caucus….

The new class of Republicans will join an already-large faction of extreme conservatives in the House, representing districts that are out of step with the rest of the country. Reporting on the members who drove last year’s government shutdown, Ryan Lizza notes that:

The ability of eighty members of the House of Representatives to push the Republican Party into a strategic course that is condemned by the party’s top strategists is a historical oddity….these eighty members represent an America where the population is getting whiter, where there are few major cities, where Obama lost the last election in a landslide, and where the Republican Party is becoming more dominant and more popular. Meanwhile, in national politics, each of these trends is actually reversed.

Why does the hard right edge of the GOP have such sway over national politics? Because Speaker John Boehner depends on them. He needs their votes to hold on to the gavel, and he needs to craft legislation to appeal to enough of them so he doesn’t need to rely on Democratic votes to pass bills. The Apocalypse Caucus sets the agenda.

The right wing of the GOP is energized by a wide network of donors, activist groups and — especially — media outlets, in which conservative politicians compete for attention, votes and dollars by trying to out-right-wing each other. There’s essentially no such thing as a Republican moderate any more, since in order to get to November, any Republican needs to get through this gauntlet.

It’s like watching the brakes fail on a driverless car that gains speed as it rolls down a hill…..

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Distrust, American Style

A few years back, I wrote a book titled Distrust, American Style: Diversity and the Crisis of Public Confidence. (Still available on Amazon–hint, hint…). The book was a response–a rebuttal, actually–to arguments advanced by Robert Putnam (better known for Bowling Alone),  who had theorized that rising levels of distrust were a response to Americans’ growing diversity.

My own research suggested otherwise. Certainly, living in urban areas populated with lots of folks who look and act differently from you can generate some anxiety, but my reading suggested a different culprit: insecurity, exacerbated by crime and the lack of a social safety net.

A telling comparison can be drawn between the U.S. and Canada, countries with very similar cultural roots and environments. Canadians watch American television, read many of the same newspapers and magazines, and even have relatively high gun ownership rates–but far less crime and social distrust. What Canada does have that U.S. Americans do not is a strong social safety net, and most importantly, universal health care.

A recent study provides further evidence of the connection between economic security and social trust.

Greater income inequality, the team found, was correlated with lower trust in others, while greater poverty, more violent crime, and an improving stock market were linked with less confidence in institutions.

We might expect that people who live in constant fear that they are one illness away from bankruptcy, who live in neighborhoods where jobs are scarce and crime is rampant, would become wary and distrustful.

Ironically, however, income inequality is equally likely to create distrust and fear in wealthier precincts. Gated communities, booming sales of security cameras, the rise in “private” police, all testify to the insecurity of the well-to-do.

Poor people fear disaster; rich people fear poor people. And no one trusts anyone.

But hey–our taxes are lower than ever.

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Watchdog? What Watchdog?

A recent Gallup poll finds that public confidence in the media is at an all-time low. Interestingly, confidence was lowest among those who reported following the news most closely. In other words, the people who arguably know the most are the people most skeptical of what they are–and are not–being told.

In my Media and Public Policy class last Wednesday, students voiced their dismay over the Indianapolis Star, which has abandoned any pretense of investigative reporting on city and state government. If someone brings an issue to the attention of the paper, they may run it, but any visible effort to actually monitor local government, or to act as the eyes and ears of the voters, is long gone.

Local television news is equally superficial, although in fairness, it is often better than the current Star. Historically, the local channels have taken their cues from print media; in the absence of anything resembling meaningful local news from newspapers, they are floundering.

So we have lots of sports coverage. And at the Star, which has continued to “downsize” its investigative reporting capacity, a new reporter for the all-important “beer and entertainment beat.”

The national networks aren’t appreciably better . In fact, their credibility may be worse.

Politifact has a new rating system, which is using scorecards to track the accuracy–or lack thereof–of network pundits and “on-air personalities.”

Right now, you can look at the NBC/MSNBC file and see how that network’s pundits and on-air talent stand. For instance, 46 percent of the claims made by NBC and MSNBC pundits and on-air personalities have been rated Mostly False, False or Pants on Fire.

At FOX and Fox News Channel, that same number is 60 percent. At CNN, it’s 18 percent.

(Forgive the snark, but I can’t help attributing CNN’s better rating to the fact that it provides less news. I mean, how much misdirection can you work into weeks spent tracking a missing plane?)

So–we can’t rely on the veracity of the national news networks, and there is no local general interest journalism left.

No wonder no one trusts anyone anymore.

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