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Politicians Like To Show Themselves In The Best Light... And In HD
By P.J. Bednarski, September 29, 2014
With a nod to the late President Nixon, it appears politicians are now leading the way toward making one thing perfectly clear: Themselves.
According to new research from Extreme Reach, political advertising in Q2 delivered 77% of its ads in HD, the highest rates among all categories measured.
So, warns the Needham, Mass.-based ad solutions firm, politicians who are considering running ads in standard definition this election season should be prepared to discover the mud from their opponent is likely to be coming back at them in vivid high definition. (Their political advisers may still advise they stay a little unclear about specific positions.)
Extreme Reach also reports, more broadly, that HD was the predominant way ads were presented in Q2, representing 58% of all ads, and as Q3 develops, that rate is up to 63%. That's up from 34% a year ago, though it peaked over half, to 52%, in Q1 of this year.
Over the past two years, Extreme Reach also says, HD has begun to dominate as the format local TV ads, too.
It surveyed 5,600 television advertisers, nearly 1,900 post-production studios and content providers, and nearly all TV and cable outlets in the US and Canada. Nearly all ads in Canada air in HD, and it's been consistenly ahead of US in the pas.
In addition, HD has become the standard for online ad campaigns, too, and 90% of ads that run online also run on TV.
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Tuesday, September 30, 2014
"... a template, if not a trend, for how women in public office or seeking public office talk about their abortions."
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Wendy Davis and why it matters that female politicians are talking about their abortions
By Nia-Malika Henderson, September 30, 2014
As Texas debates the implementation of some of the strictest abortion laws in the country, for at least three female lawmakers and candidates in that state, the debate has become intensely personal.
The most high-profile of the three, of course, is gubernatorial hopeful and state Sen. Wendy Davis (D), who revealed recently in her memoir that she had medical procedures to end two pregnancies.
“Our baby had a severe brain abnormality,” Davis said in a television interview. “We knew that the most loving thing that we could do for our daughter was to say goodbye.”
Davis, now trailing badly in her campaign, made her name on abortion politics, shooting to national prominence in 2013 on the strength of a 13-hour filibuster of the restrictive abortion laws.
Her careful abortion admission puts her and her fellow Texans in rare political company and represents a notable break from how abortion has typically been discussed by female politicians. But as with everything — and particularly abortion — there is a stark partisan divide.
Molly White, a conservative antiabortion activist now running unopposed for a Texas House seat, has also disclosed two abortions. But in contrast to Davis, she has argued that women like her suffer from psychological trauma and are prone to substance abuse. She has implied that only women who have had abortions can understand those drawbacks.
That prompted another abortion disclosure from Dawnna Dukes, a Democratic Texas state representative who was sitting on a panel on women's health issues with White recently and fought back against White's claims.
"To the world, I had an abortion,” Dukes said, revealing something she hadn't even told her parents.
First, some context. One in three women will have an abortion by the time they are 45. By our count, five female politicians have said they are among those millions. Davis has said that her revelations are not political, but rather personal details that could help other women and their families in similar circumstances. And her abortions are within the realm of what some have called "good abortions" — largely non-controversial abortions that a wide swath of the public agrees should be safe and legal. There is little political downside or social stigma involved.
White is a departure from what we've typically seen from GOP women, who have in some cases made their choice not to have an abortion a political issue. Sarah Palin, most notably, has said she considered having an abortion when she found out that her son, Trig, would have Down syndrome. Palin also said she was proud of her daughter Bristol's decision to have her baby when she was pregnant as an unwed teenager. White's abortion narrative is more along the lines of a conversion; she believed one thing, and now believes something else. She is framing herself as a witness bearing a hard-earned truth.
Dukes's abortion revelation, meanwhile, highlights the stigma that comes with such a disclosure. She said in a Facebook post that she didn't have any psychological fallout from the procedure, and also said she had not "chosen to be promiscuous in my life relationship decisions."
"My reason for making this decision was private and will remain private — end of story," she wrote. "Folks have about as much right to know why as they have a right to know when/why you have a pap smear, rectal exam or root-canal — none what-so-ever."
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Wendy Davis and why it matters that female politicians are talking about their abortions
By Nia-Malika Henderson, September 30, 2014
As Texas debates the implementation of some of the strictest abortion laws in the country, for at least three female lawmakers and candidates in that state, the debate has become intensely personal.
The most high-profile of the three, of course, is gubernatorial hopeful and state Sen. Wendy Davis (D), who revealed recently in her memoir that she had medical procedures to end two pregnancies.
“Our baby had a severe brain abnormality,” Davis said in a television interview. “We knew that the most loving thing that we could do for our daughter was to say goodbye.”
Davis, now trailing badly in her campaign, made her name on abortion politics, shooting to national prominence in 2013 on the strength of a 13-hour filibuster of the restrictive abortion laws.
Her careful abortion admission puts her and her fellow Texans in rare political company and represents a notable break from how abortion has typically been discussed by female politicians. But as with everything — and particularly abortion — there is a stark partisan divide.
Molly White, a conservative antiabortion activist now running unopposed for a Texas House seat, has also disclosed two abortions. But in contrast to Davis, she has argued that women like her suffer from psychological trauma and are prone to substance abuse. She has implied that only women who have had abortions can understand those drawbacks.
That prompted another abortion disclosure from Dawnna Dukes, a Democratic Texas state representative who was sitting on a panel on women's health issues with White recently and fought back against White's claims.
"To the world, I had an abortion,” Dukes said, revealing something she hadn't even told her parents.
Emily Ramshaw @eramshawAlong with the three Texan women, at least two others — Nevada Assemblywoman Lucy Flores (a Democrat running in a high-profile lieutenant governor's race in Nevada) and Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) — have also talked about having abortions. Collectively, what has emerged is something of a template, if not a trend, for how women in public office or seeking public office talk about their abortions.
During my heated #tribunefest women’s health panel today, @DawnnaDukes revealed that she had an abortion http://trib.it/1mrKviW #ttfhealth
Rep. Dawnna Dukes @DawnnaDukes
@eramshaw My statement was 2 counter that abortion causes women 2 become alcoholics/drug addicts. FALSE! Those women need counseling period.
3:31 PM - 20 Sep 2014
First, some context. One in three women will have an abortion by the time they are 45. By our count, five female politicians have said they are among those millions. Davis has said that her revelations are not political, but rather personal details that could help other women and their families in similar circumstances. And her abortions are within the realm of what some have called "good abortions" — largely non-controversial abortions that a wide swath of the public agrees should be safe and legal. There is little political downside or social stigma involved.
White is a departure from what we've typically seen from GOP women, who have in some cases made their choice not to have an abortion a political issue. Sarah Palin, most notably, has said she considered having an abortion when she found out that her son, Trig, would have Down syndrome. Palin also said she was proud of her daughter Bristol's decision to have her baby when she was pregnant as an unwed teenager. White's abortion narrative is more along the lines of a conversion; she believed one thing, and now believes something else. She is framing herself as a witness bearing a hard-earned truth.
Dukes's abortion revelation, meanwhile, highlights the stigma that comes with such a disclosure. She said in a Facebook post that she didn't have any psychological fallout from the procedure, and also said she had not "chosen to be promiscuous in my life relationship decisions."
"My reason for making this decision was private and will remain private — end of story," she wrote. "Folks have about as much right to know why as they have a right to know when/why you have a pap smear, rectal exam or root-canal — none what-so-ever."
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"If we can bring together two dozen citizens who are Republicans, Democrats, and Independents, and have them respectfully and thoughtfully talk about contentious political issues, there's still hope for our polarized democracy."
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Political Values Are Dividing Us Over Basic Facts, Not Just Policy Choices
By Justin Reedy and Christopher Wells, September 30, 2014
You can't open a newspaper -- or pull up The Huffington Post -- these days without encountering evidence of our country's political disagreement. Everything from the best policy for solving a problem to the core values that should guide our nation seem to be hotly contested -- the grist for verbal smack-downs in Congress or cynical attack advertisements. Contention is to be expected in a democracy, since this is, after all, the airing of competing notions of the public good and how it should be pursued.
But most conceptions of democracy assume that these arguments will be over values and priorities -- that we observe the world around us, and apply our personal conscience (and, of course, self-interest) to the political choices we face.
Unfortunately, research is showing that it isn't this simple. Much of the time citizens hold different understandings of even the basic facts related to the topics we are debating. We started investigating this phenomenon after noticing some odd distortions in a survey of citizen knowledge on a ballot measure in Washington state, and we're now one team in a community of researchers looking at the problem.
What is becoming clear is that our political ideology shapes more than just our values and sense of right and wrong -- it can also lead us to believe or disbelieve "facts" about the world, regardless of whether they're real or not. This doesn't bode well for a vibrant democracy and good governance when opposing political groups can have their own sets of facts in line with their ideology. For example, many conservatives in opposition to Obamacare latched onto a false claim that the law would create "death panels" to decide if ailing patients would be allowed to die instead of getting life-saving care. Even worse, research on these shoddy facts has shown that trying to correct them with fact-checking claims doesn't help, and can even cause people to double down on their false beliefs.
In our most recent study, we set out to discover how this knowledge distortion occurs, and where the false "facts" that people believe come from. For many, the obvious answer is that media, and especially partisan media, must be to blame. Liberals see Fox News as a bogeyman brainwashing conservatives with false information. Conservatives claim that the mainstream media itself is so liberal that many citizens are continuously duped by it.
We also suspected that media messages played an important role in citizens' acceptance of false beliefs -- or rejections of true ones. So we conducted a study to test it. We looked at three ballot measures, which are good for studying misperceptions of facts because they are new issues that people have to learn about, and they often don't have obvious partisan leanings that people can over-rely on when deciding how to vote. We asked people several factual questions about each ballot initiative, then scored each person's answers: they got a 0 for getting a question correct, a +1 for getting a question wrong in a way that would predispose them to the conservative position on the initiative (for example, if they grossly overestimated the cost of switching to renewable energy sources, as would've been required by one of the ballot initiatives), and a -1 for getting a question wrong in a way that would predispose them to the liberal position (for example, if they grossly underestimated the cost of renewables).
We added up those answers and called this measure the knowledge distortion index -- an overall score indicating whether someone's factual beliefs on a ballot measure were distorted in a systematically partisan way. Then we compared people's knowledge distortion with other political characteristics, and found three important things. First, people's overall scores were highly correlated with their ideology. More conservative people tended to have misinformation scores tending upwards (or in a conservative direction), and liberal people tended to have misinformation scores in negative territory (a liberal direction).
Second, we found that for two of the ballot measures, people who knew more about the political system in general had misinformation scores that were even more highly correlated with ideology than people with less knowledge of politics. So it looks like general knowledge doesn't help people out of being misinformed -- in fact, it helps them get more misinformed.
All of this was interesting, but it still didn't tell us what role the media was playing. So we introduced further measures into our model to examine whether media use was connected with people holding misinformed beliefs. The answer, to our surprise, was no. People had distorted factual beliefs about the ballot measures despite reporting little or no exposure to the media coverage and campaign messages on those issues. In fact, whether you saw a lot, a little, or no campaign coverage made no difference in how distorted your beliefs about the issues were.
All of this doesn't bode well for democracy, even at the state level and in policy areas that aren't even explicitly partisan. If people are seemingly able to develop false factual beliefs without any help from ideologically driven media messages, and if efforts like news media fact-checking are failing to correct shoddy facts, then what hope do we have for a vibrant, meaningful public debate?
Ideas coming from a research program known as deliberative democracy are suggesting a startlingly simple answer: Bring together people to focus on an issue and talk about it. One of the innovations from this work is called the Citizens' Initiative Review. CIRs are panels of average citizens, invited from voter registration files to ensure diversity according to factors like political preference, location and occupation. They spend 2-3 days learning about and discussing proposed policies, hearing from experts and campaigns, and identifying trade-offs and likely outcomes. This is key: rather than making a snap judgment, these "citizen juries" are provided with time, resources -- and responsibility -- to make sound judgments. In the end, they communicate their findings and recommendations to their fellow citizens.
What we are seeing so far is that average citizens are willing and able to do this. Citizens and state legislators in Oregon were so pleased with their inaugural Citizens' Initiative Review in 2012 that it is now an institution mandated by state law. This year, Arizona and Colorado are pilot testing the CIR process. If we can bring together two dozen citizens who are Republicans, Democrats, and Independents, and have them respectfully and thoughtfully talk about contentious political issues, there's still hope for our polarized democracy.
...................................................................................................................................................................
Political Values Are Dividing Us Over Basic Facts, Not Just Policy Choices
By Justin Reedy and Christopher Wells, September 30, 2014
You can't open a newspaper -- or pull up The Huffington Post -- these days without encountering evidence of our country's political disagreement. Everything from the best policy for solving a problem to the core values that should guide our nation seem to be hotly contested -- the grist for verbal smack-downs in Congress or cynical attack advertisements. Contention is to be expected in a democracy, since this is, after all, the airing of competing notions of the public good and how it should be pursued.
But most conceptions of democracy assume that these arguments will be over values and priorities -- that we observe the world around us, and apply our personal conscience (and, of course, self-interest) to the political choices we face.
Unfortunately, research is showing that it isn't this simple. Much of the time citizens hold different understandings of even the basic facts related to the topics we are debating. We started investigating this phenomenon after noticing some odd distortions in a survey of citizen knowledge on a ballot measure in Washington state, and we're now one team in a community of researchers looking at the problem.
What is becoming clear is that our political ideology shapes more than just our values and sense of right and wrong -- it can also lead us to believe or disbelieve "facts" about the world, regardless of whether they're real or not. This doesn't bode well for a vibrant democracy and good governance when opposing political groups can have their own sets of facts in line with their ideology. For example, many conservatives in opposition to Obamacare latched onto a false claim that the law would create "death panels" to decide if ailing patients would be allowed to die instead of getting life-saving care. Even worse, research on these shoddy facts has shown that trying to correct them with fact-checking claims doesn't help, and can even cause people to double down on their false beliefs.
In our most recent study, we set out to discover how this knowledge distortion occurs, and where the false "facts" that people believe come from. For many, the obvious answer is that media, and especially partisan media, must be to blame. Liberals see Fox News as a bogeyman brainwashing conservatives with false information. Conservatives claim that the mainstream media itself is so liberal that many citizens are continuously duped by it.
We also suspected that media messages played an important role in citizens' acceptance of false beliefs -- or rejections of true ones. So we conducted a study to test it. We looked at three ballot measures, which are good for studying misperceptions of facts because they are new issues that people have to learn about, and they often don't have obvious partisan leanings that people can over-rely on when deciding how to vote. We asked people several factual questions about each ballot initiative, then scored each person's answers: they got a 0 for getting a question correct, a +1 for getting a question wrong in a way that would predispose them to the conservative position on the initiative (for example, if they grossly overestimated the cost of switching to renewable energy sources, as would've been required by one of the ballot initiatives), and a -1 for getting a question wrong in a way that would predispose them to the liberal position (for example, if they grossly underestimated the cost of renewables).
We added up those answers and called this measure the knowledge distortion index -- an overall score indicating whether someone's factual beliefs on a ballot measure were distorted in a systematically partisan way. Then we compared people's knowledge distortion with other political characteristics, and found three important things. First, people's overall scores were highly correlated with their ideology. More conservative people tended to have misinformation scores tending upwards (or in a conservative direction), and liberal people tended to have misinformation scores in negative territory (a liberal direction).
Second, we found that for two of the ballot measures, people who knew more about the political system in general had misinformation scores that were even more highly correlated with ideology than people with less knowledge of politics. So it looks like general knowledge doesn't help people out of being misinformed -- in fact, it helps them get more misinformed.
All of this was interesting, but it still didn't tell us what role the media was playing. So we introduced further measures into our model to examine whether media use was connected with people holding misinformed beliefs. The answer, to our surprise, was no. People had distorted factual beliefs about the ballot measures despite reporting little or no exposure to the media coverage and campaign messages on those issues. In fact, whether you saw a lot, a little, or no campaign coverage made no difference in how distorted your beliefs about the issues were.
All of this doesn't bode well for democracy, even at the state level and in policy areas that aren't even explicitly partisan. If people are seemingly able to develop false factual beliefs without any help from ideologically driven media messages, and if efforts like news media fact-checking are failing to correct shoddy facts, then what hope do we have for a vibrant, meaningful public debate?
Ideas coming from a research program known as deliberative democracy are suggesting a startlingly simple answer: Bring together people to focus on an issue and talk about it. One of the innovations from this work is called the Citizens' Initiative Review. CIRs are panels of average citizens, invited from voter registration files to ensure diversity according to factors like political preference, location and occupation. They spend 2-3 days learning about and discussing proposed policies, hearing from experts and campaigns, and identifying trade-offs and likely outcomes. This is key: rather than making a snap judgment, these "citizen juries" are provided with time, resources -- and responsibility -- to make sound judgments. In the end, they communicate their findings and recommendations to their fellow citizens.
What we are seeing so far is that average citizens are willing and able to do this. Citizens and state legislators in Oregon were so pleased with their inaugural Citizens' Initiative Review in 2012 that it is now an institution mandated by state law. This year, Arizona and Colorado are pilot testing the CIR process. If we can bring together two dozen citizens who are Republicans, Democrats, and Independents, and have them respectfully and thoughtfully talk about contentious political issues, there's still hope for our polarized democracy.
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If the cat is smart, he won't vote for the Koch brothers-promoted candidates!
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Koch group investigated for faulty mailers
By Zachary Roth, September 29, 2014
A Koch brothers group is being investigated for sending mailers with incorrect information about how to register to vote to hundreds of North Carolina voters—and one cat.
Joshua Lawson, a spokesman for the state board of elections, said his office opened the probe Monday after receiving a formal sworn complaint from the state Democratic Party about the mailers, which were sent recently by Americans for Prosperity (AFP). Lawson said state law requires the board to open an investigation if it receives a sworn complaint.
In the complaint, Casey Mann, the state Democratic Party’s executive director, accused AFP of an “attempt to utilize misleading, incorrect, and confusing voter registration mailers as a means of discouraging or intimidating voters in the 2014 general election.”
Deliberately misleading people about how to vote is a felony.
Lawson said that as part of its investigation, the board had already been in contact with lawyers for AFP, and has urged the group to disseminate correct registration information in order to undo the damage.
AFP has said the mailers were an honest mistake, not an effort to mislead voters. But this isn’t the first time that the group, which came to prominence as part of the tea party movement, has sent out inaccurate voting information. And it’s also been involved in organized efforts to make voting harder.
The “official application form” sent by AFP tells people to return their application to the secretary of state’s office, but the envelope is addressed to the state board of elections. In fact, applications shouldn’t go to either place — they should be sent to a voter’s local election board. The form also tells applicants that it’s due 30 days before an election, when it’s actually due 25 days before. And it includes the wrong zip code for the board of elections.
The faulty mailing was first reported Thursday by the Raleigh News and Observer, which also noted several other errors. The state elections board has received hundreds of complaint calls from angry and confused North Carolinians who received the mailer, a spokesman told the paper. One woman said she received a form addressed to her cat.
In a statement, a spokesman for AFP downplayed the mistakes as “a few minor administrative errors.”
Deliberately misleading or not, it’s happened before. In 2011, AFP sent out absentee ballot applications for eight Wisconsin state Senate recall elections, telling recipients to return them by August 11. Problem was, six of the elections were scheduled for August 9. AFP blamed that episode on the printing company it worked with.
AFP is also alleged to have played an active role in helping Republicans suppress the vote. According to a report by One Wisconsin Now, a liberal group, in 2010, AFP discussed a “voter caging” scheme with the Wisconsin GOP and tea party activists, in which a mailer was to be sent to minority and student voters, telling them they had to confirm their voter registration. Any mailers returned as undeliverable were then to be used by tea party volunteers to challenge the eligibility of voters at the polls.
AFP’s Wisconsin director said at the time the effort aimed to combat voter fraud. It’s not clear how much of it was put into practice.
AFP also has hosted events featuring speakers from True the Vote, a tea party-linked group which aims to stoke concern over voter fraud in an effort to build support for voting restrictions. It also has promoted Anita MonCrief, a former Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) employee who now warns about the threat of fraud. AFP bills MonCrief as “the ACORN Whistleblower.”
Nor is the error-strewn North Carolina mailer the only misleading message put out by Tar Heel State conservatives ahead of a tight U.S. Senate race that could help determine control of the chamber. State Senate President Phil Berger recently ran a TV ad which implied, falsely, that voters will be required to show ID at the polls this year. In fact, the ID requirement that was part of the sweeping voting law passed last year by state Republicans doesn’t kick in until 2016. Berger changed the ad after the NAACP filed a formal complaint.
The battle over voting in North Carolina has been steadily heating up since the Obama campaign used a massive minority turnout to win the previously-red state in 2008, and it came close to doing so again in 2012. The Senate race could well hinge on black turnout.
As for AFP itself, there’s an irony here. ACORN was hounded out of existence thanks largely to sloppy procedures in its voter registration drives, which let some employees turn in registration forms that had fraudulent information. AFP and its allies seized on those mistakes to allege massive voter fraud, with essentially no evidence to support the charge.
Even assuming Americans for Prosperity is guilty only of honest mistakes, it may have a similar sloppiness problem to ACORN. After all, it’s happened more than once. But don’t hold your breath waiting for “election integrity” advocates to demand action.
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Koch group investigated for faulty mailers
By Zachary Roth, September 29, 2014
A Koch brothers group is being investigated for sending mailers with incorrect information about how to register to vote to hundreds of North Carolina voters—and one cat.
Joshua Lawson, a spokesman for the state board of elections, said his office opened the probe Monday after receiving a formal sworn complaint from the state Democratic Party about the mailers, which were sent recently by Americans for Prosperity (AFP). Lawson said state law requires the board to open an investigation if it receives a sworn complaint.
In the complaint, Casey Mann, the state Democratic Party’s executive director, accused AFP of an “attempt to utilize misleading, incorrect, and confusing voter registration mailers as a means of discouraging or intimidating voters in the 2014 general election.”
Deliberately misleading people about how to vote is a felony.
Lawson said that as part of its investigation, the board had already been in contact with lawyers for AFP, and has urged the group to disseminate correct registration information in order to undo the damage.
AFP has said the mailers were an honest mistake, not an effort to mislead voters. But this isn’t the first time that the group, which came to prominence as part of the tea party movement, has sent out inaccurate voting information. And it’s also been involved in organized efforts to make voting harder.
The “official application form” sent by AFP tells people to return their application to the secretary of state’s office, but the envelope is addressed to the state board of elections. In fact, applications shouldn’t go to either place — they should be sent to a voter’s local election board. The form also tells applicants that it’s due 30 days before an election, when it’s actually due 25 days before. And it includes the wrong zip code for the board of elections.
The faulty mailing was first reported Thursday by the Raleigh News and Observer, which also noted several other errors. The state elections board has received hundreds of complaint calls from angry and confused North Carolinians who received the mailer, a spokesman told the paper. One woman said she received a form addressed to her cat.
In a statement, a spokesman for AFP downplayed the mistakes as “a few minor administrative errors.”
Deliberately misleading or not, it’s happened before. In 2011, AFP sent out absentee ballot applications for eight Wisconsin state Senate recall elections, telling recipients to return them by August 11. Problem was, six of the elections were scheduled for August 9. AFP blamed that episode on the printing company it worked with.
AFP is also alleged to have played an active role in helping Republicans suppress the vote. According to a report by One Wisconsin Now, a liberal group, in 2010, AFP discussed a “voter caging” scheme with the Wisconsin GOP and tea party activists, in which a mailer was to be sent to minority and student voters, telling them they had to confirm their voter registration. Any mailers returned as undeliverable were then to be used by tea party volunteers to challenge the eligibility of voters at the polls.
AFP’s Wisconsin director said at the time the effort aimed to combat voter fraud. It’s not clear how much of it was put into practice.
AFP also has hosted events featuring speakers from True the Vote, a tea party-linked group which aims to stoke concern over voter fraud in an effort to build support for voting restrictions. It also has promoted Anita MonCrief, a former Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) employee who now warns about the threat of fraud. AFP bills MonCrief as “the ACORN Whistleblower.”
Nor is the error-strewn North Carolina mailer the only misleading message put out by Tar Heel State conservatives ahead of a tight U.S. Senate race that could help determine control of the chamber. State Senate President Phil Berger recently ran a TV ad which implied, falsely, that voters will be required to show ID at the polls this year. In fact, the ID requirement that was part of the sweeping voting law passed last year by state Republicans doesn’t kick in until 2016. Berger changed the ad after the NAACP filed a formal complaint.
The battle over voting in North Carolina has been steadily heating up since the Obama campaign used a massive minority turnout to win the previously-red state in 2008, and it came close to doing so again in 2012. The Senate race could well hinge on black turnout.
As for AFP itself, there’s an irony here. ACORN was hounded out of existence thanks largely to sloppy procedures in its voter registration drives, which let some employees turn in registration forms that had fraudulent information. AFP and its allies seized on those mistakes to allege massive voter fraud, with essentially no evidence to support the charge.
Even assuming Americans for Prosperity is guilty only of honest mistakes, it may have a similar sloppiness problem to ACORN. After all, it’s happened more than once. But don’t hold your breath waiting for “election integrity” advocates to demand action.
...................................................................................................................................................................
Monday, September 29, 2014
"... beginning with the Gary Hart scandal, private mores and sexual behavior became part of the regular political conversation ..."
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How Far Should Journalists Go When Probing The Private Lives Of Political Candidates?
By RadioBoston, September 29, 2014
As Massachusetts voters prepare to elect a new governor, one of the perennial questions in a political race involves how far the press should probe a candidate’s private life. Matt Bai, a reporter for The New York Times, wrote about this recently in a piece he called, “Original Sin.”
It tells the the sensational story of Gary Hart’s presidential bid in 1987 — and how it came crashing down amid revelations of an extramarital affair.
As Bai writes, this was “an unprecedented collision of media, politics and sex.” Before that moment, Bai makes the point that journalists pretty much stayed out of politicians’ private lives.
Presidents from Roosevelt to Kennedy to Johnson got a free pass, despite evidence of marital infidelity. But beginning with the Gary Hart scandal, private mores and sexual behavior became part of the regular political conversation — from Bill Clinton to Jesse Jackson to General David Petraeus.
Matt Bai suggests this shift has damaged political journalism and our political culture. Is he right?
Tom Fiedler played a central role in the Gary Hart story. Now, Fiedler is the dean of Boston University’s College of Communication. But back in 1987, he was a political reporter for the Miami Herald who published an explosive investigative story that ended Gary Hart’s quest for the presidency.
The story transfixed the nation, not only because of the lurid details of a journalistic sting, sex and denials. But also, as Tom Fiedler reminds us, because of who Gary Hart was — and how close the handsome senator from Colorado came to being president.
“He had double-digit leads over any of the other opponents out there,” said Fiedler. “And, he had double-digit leads over the likely Republican nominee, George H.W. Bush.”
...................................................................................................................................................................
How Far Should Journalists Go When Probing The Private Lives Of Political Candidates?
By RadioBoston, September 29, 2014
As Massachusetts voters prepare to elect a new governor, one of the perennial questions in a political race involves how far the press should probe a candidate’s private life. Matt Bai, a reporter for The New York Times, wrote about this recently in a piece he called, “Original Sin.”
It tells the the sensational story of Gary Hart’s presidential bid in 1987 — and how it came crashing down amid revelations of an extramarital affair.
As Bai writes, this was “an unprecedented collision of media, politics and sex.” Before that moment, Bai makes the point that journalists pretty much stayed out of politicians’ private lives.
Presidents from Roosevelt to Kennedy to Johnson got a free pass, despite evidence of marital infidelity. But beginning with the Gary Hart scandal, private mores and sexual behavior became part of the regular political conversation — from Bill Clinton to Jesse Jackson to General David Petraeus.
Matt Bai suggests this shift has damaged political journalism and our political culture. Is he right?
Tom Fiedler played a central role in the Gary Hart story. Now, Fiedler is the dean of Boston University’s College of Communication. But back in 1987, he was a political reporter for the Miami Herald who published an explosive investigative story that ended Gary Hart’s quest for the presidency.
The story transfixed the nation, not only because of the lurid details of a journalistic sting, sex and denials. But also, as Tom Fiedler reminds us, because of who Gary Hart was — and how close the handsome senator from Colorado came to being president.
“He had double-digit leads over any of the other opponents out there,” said Fiedler. “And, he had double-digit leads over the likely Republican nominee, George H.W. Bush.”
...................................................................................................................................................................
"It’s time that Congress reconsider its stance on the anonymity of donors to Super PACs. In a world where political speech is unfettered, voters need every way possible to judge its truthfulness."
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Transparency needed on political ads
Novelist George Orwell once said, “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful.”
Florida Tims-Union, September 29, 2014
And when it comes to political advertising, it’s often difficult to discern the fabrications from the truth.
Unlike advertisements for goods and services, political ads are not held to disclosure standards by the federal government. It’s perfectly legal for political ads to use whoppers and tall tales under the established policy that political speech deserves First Amendment protection.
While candidates are not hesitant to attack their opponents, they generally shy away from clearly bogus claims that may taint their integrity. In addition, when it’s clear a particular candidate paid for an ad, voters can weigh more effectively whether to accept the premise of that ad.
Not so with the type of Political Action Committees known as Super PACs, which support specific candidates or issues but remain officially disconnected from them. These Super PACs can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money, yet their donors are often functionally anonymous.
Nonprofit corporations are able to contribute unlimited amounts to Super PACs but do not have to disclose the names of the individual donors. So were born numerous nonprofits specifically for the purpose of concealing the names of super PAC donors, making it impossible for voters to judge the veracity of an ad by knowing who paid for it.
It’s time that Congress reconsider its stance on the anonymity of donors to Super PACs. In a world where political speech is unfettered, voters need every way possible to judge its truthfulness.
Perhaps Orwell’s quote could stand rephrasing. “PACs are designed to make lies sound truthful.”
...................................................................................................................................................................
Transparency needed on political ads
Novelist George Orwell once said, “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful.”
Florida Tims-Union, September 29, 2014
And when it comes to political advertising, it’s often difficult to discern the fabrications from the truth.
Unlike advertisements for goods and services, political ads are not held to disclosure standards by the federal government. It’s perfectly legal for political ads to use whoppers and tall tales under the established policy that political speech deserves First Amendment protection.
While candidates are not hesitant to attack their opponents, they generally shy away from clearly bogus claims that may taint their integrity. In addition, when it’s clear a particular candidate paid for an ad, voters can weigh more effectively whether to accept the premise of that ad.
Not so with the type of Political Action Committees known as Super PACs, which support specific candidates or issues but remain officially disconnected from them. These Super PACs can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money, yet their donors are often functionally anonymous.
Nonprofit corporations are able to contribute unlimited amounts to Super PACs but do not have to disclose the names of the individual donors. So were born numerous nonprofits specifically for the purpose of concealing the names of super PAC donors, making it impossible for voters to judge the veracity of an ad by knowing who paid for it.
It’s time that Congress reconsider its stance on the anonymity of donors to Super PACs. In a world where political speech is unfettered, voters need every way possible to judge its truthfulness.
Perhaps Orwell’s quote could stand rephrasing. “PACs are designed to make lies sound truthful.”
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At the behest of the Koch brothers and their ALEC, "... Republicans are actively thwarting the voting rights of working-Americans and people of color."
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The Koch Brothers, ALEC and the GOP Are Trying To Win The Election By Destroying Democracy
By Rmuse, September 29, 2014
There is a saying that “all is fair in love and war,” and although at first blush it seems a reasonable proposition, it certainly is not true. For example, it is against the law for a man to kidnap a woman he loves and keep her imprisoned against her will, just as it is illegal to torture prisoners of war; unless it is America doing the torturing. But that is another story. The point is that in matters of the heart and war, like in politics, there are universally-accepted conventions that all participants are expected to follow regardless their intent to win at any cost. Obviously, Republicans embrace the “all’s fair” mindset in their drive to control the nation and since the election of an African American man as President, they have taken extreme measures to destroy democracy by disenfranchising voters who are not inclined to support the corporate-theocracy Republicans are fighting to impose on America.
Although America’s representative democracy is on the verge of becoming a laughing stock and collapsing, there are still some Americans able to enjoy unfettered access to participate in the electoral process. However, if Republicans and their money machine have their way, fewer Americans will be given access to the polls and they have abandoned any pretense of concealing their drive to limit voting privileges to white Christians dedicated to electing white Republicans to political office. Over the course of the lead up to the midterm elections, and since the conservative Supreme Court eviscerated key aspects of the Voting Rights Act, Republicans in the states have unashamedly launched vote suppression efforts in state after state targeting people of color, young people, working-class Americans, and the elderly. Crucial to their success is Republicans’ heavy dependence on one of the Koch brothers’ legislative arms, the American Legislative Exchange Council, to create template legislation for Republicans to block access to voting in what can only be termed as a direct assault on America’s rapidly waning democracy.
It should surprise no American that ALEC is anti-democracy since last February its members refused to sign a pledge supporting democracy, likely at the behest of their funders the Koch brothers. Dissatisfied that Republican-led states are doing enough to obstruct democracy, the Koch brothers tasked their other anti-democracy organization, Americans for Prosperity, to take what may be illegal actions to suppress the vote in North Carolina. Residents in the state have already witnessed a barrage of anti-democracy voter suppression tactics thanks to the Koch brothers’ ALEC legislation, but apparently it is not enough for the Kochs who charged AFP with the job of deliberately misinforming North Carolina voters to prevent them from participating in democracy.
North Carolina’s Americans for Prosperity sent out faulty voter registration forms and blatantly false information in what exceeds even the sleaziest dirty election tricks a few weeks before an election. In the mailings, Americans for Prosperity gave out the wrong deadline for registering to vote by cutting the authentic “registration window short by five days.” Included in the mailing was the wrong offices and zip codes for turning in voter registration forms as well as false information about how prospective voters would be notified about their precinct after they register to vote. That is providing they discovered the correct date and address to turn in the voter registration form on time to be able to vote.
The director of Americans for Prosperity, N.C., shrugged off the deliberate misinformation as “non-substantive” and just a “minor administrative error,” but it is not “minor” or “non-substantive” for hundreds-of-thousands of potential voters the Koch brothers’ thugs are attempting to disenfranchise. The AFP director revealed the Koch and Republican mindset is founded on their belief that N.C. voters unlikely to support Republicans are “non-substantive,” likely due to their racial makeup and economic station. That too is another story that is spreading across the former Confederacy where Republicans are actively thwarting the voting rights of working-Americans and people of color.
In Georgia once again, a second and third county are joining the Republican, ALEC, and Koch brother war on democracy by restricting voting of working-class people who have to work on Election Day. The reason? Republicans think the idea of every American participating in democracy is wrong because “it would mean too many people are voting.” Just last week, another Georgia Republican, Fran Millar, said he was working with other state Republicans to put a halt to African Americans voting because he “would prefer more educated voters than a greater increase in the number of voters.” The idea of all Americans voting, especially African Americans, is something Republicans cannot countenance and like all Republicans, Millar hopes “it can be stopped.” The idea of not supporting, and indeed destroying, democracy is by all appearance now a major policy position of the conservative movement.
This anti-democracy crusade is not reserved to the Koch brothers’ legislative arms in the former Confederacy. A couple of weeks ago New Jersey Governor Chris Christie went on a rant condemning democracy as “shocking, underhanded, and a dirty tactic” and yet there was little response from Democrats at the national or state level. If, as Democrats claim, the fast-approaching midterm elections are critical to Americans, why are they not revealing the Koch-Republican dirty assault on democracy? For dog’s sake, Republicans have spent the past five years falsely accusing the President and Democrats of “destroying the Constitution” and attempting to rule as dictators.
These Republican, ALEC, Americans for Prosperity, and Koch brother attacks on America’s democracy are not solely targeting African Americans; they are targeting working-class Americans who are working longer hours to survive and have issues making it to the polls on Election Day. Regardless if it is eliminating early voting, sending out phony polling place and voter registration information, or threatening armed intimidation of voters, Republicans are attacking America’s fragile democracy.
It is, frankly, astonishing that Republicans are openly working to restrict all Americans’ right to vote with little pushback from Democrats because the concept of democracy is allegedly the defining feature of “American exceptionalism.” Regardless of any Americans’ political leanings, it is difficult to imagine that only die-hard theocrats and corporatists would condone destroying democracy, but it is just as difficult to comprehend why Democrats are not making the Republicans’ effort a major campaign issue; particularly in former Confederate states where Republicans are actively touting their efforts to restrict democracy to white, Christian, and Republican supporters.
Democrats need to come to their senses and put half the effort into informing Americans about the Republican attack on this nation’s democracy as they do promising to fight for middle-class Americans. Because at the rate Republicans are destroying democracy, Democrats are doomed to do nothing for the people because the Kochs, AFP, ALEC, and Republicans are easily eliminating Democrats’ chances of remaining in office by killing democracy with little to no opposition.
...................................................................................................................................................................
The Koch Brothers, ALEC and the GOP Are Trying To Win The Election By Destroying Democracy
By Rmuse, September 29, 2014
There is a saying that “all is fair in love and war,” and although at first blush it seems a reasonable proposition, it certainly is not true. For example, it is against the law for a man to kidnap a woman he loves and keep her imprisoned against her will, just as it is illegal to torture prisoners of war; unless it is America doing the torturing. But that is another story. The point is that in matters of the heart and war, like in politics, there are universally-accepted conventions that all participants are expected to follow regardless their intent to win at any cost. Obviously, Republicans embrace the “all’s fair” mindset in their drive to control the nation and since the election of an African American man as President, they have taken extreme measures to destroy democracy by disenfranchising voters who are not inclined to support the corporate-theocracy Republicans are fighting to impose on America.
Although America’s representative democracy is on the verge of becoming a laughing stock and collapsing, there are still some Americans able to enjoy unfettered access to participate in the electoral process. However, if Republicans and their money machine have their way, fewer Americans will be given access to the polls and they have abandoned any pretense of concealing their drive to limit voting privileges to white Christians dedicated to electing white Republicans to political office. Over the course of the lead up to the midterm elections, and since the conservative Supreme Court eviscerated key aspects of the Voting Rights Act, Republicans in the states have unashamedly launched vote suppression efforts in state after state targeting people of color, young people, working-class Americans, and the elderly. Crucial to their success is Republicans’ heavy dependence on one of the Koch brothers’ legislative arms, the American Legislative Exchange Council, to create template legislation for Republicans to block access to voting in what can only be termed as a direct assault on America’s rapidly waning democracy.
It should surprise no American that ALEC is anti-democracy since last February its members refused to sign a pledge supporting democracy, likely at the behest of their funders the Koch brothers. Dissatisfied that Republican-led states are doing enough to obstruct democracy, the Koch brothers tasked their other anti-democracy organization, Americans for Prosperity, to take what may be illegal actions to suppress the vote in North Carolina. Residents in the state have already witnessed a barrage of anti-democracy voter suppression tactics thanks to the Koch brothers’ ALEC legislation, but apparently it is not enough for the Kochs who charged AFP with the job of deliberately misinforming North Carolina voters to prevent them from participating in democracy.
North Carolina’s Americans for Prosperity sent out faulty voter registration forms and blatantly false information in what exceeds even the sleaziest dirty election tricks a few weeks before an election. In the mailings, Americans for Prosperity gave out the wrong deadline for registering to vote by cutting the authentic “registration window short by five days.” Included in the mailing was the wrong offices and zip codes for turning in voter registration forms as well as false information about how prospective voters would be notified about their precinct after they register to vote. That is providing they discovered the correct date and address to turn in the voter registration form on time to be able to vote.
The director of Americans for Prosperity, N.C., shrugged off the deliberate misinformation as “non-substantive” and just a “minor administrative error,” but it is not “minor” or “non-substantive” for hundreds-of-thousands of potential voters the Koch brothers’ thugs are attempting to disenfranchise. The AFP director revealed the Koch and Republican mindset is founded on their belief that N.C. voters unlikely to support Republicans are “non-substantive,” likely due to their racial makeup and economic station. That too is another story that is spreading across the former Confederacy where Republicans are actively thwarting the voting rights of working-Americans and people of color.
In Georgia once again, a second and third county are joining the Republican, ALEC, and Koch brother war on democracy by restricting voting of working-class people who have to work on Election Day. The reason? Republicans think the idea of every American participating in democracy is wrong because “it would mean too many people are voting.” Just last week, another Georgia Republican, Fran Millar, said he was working with other state Republicans to put a halt to African Americans voting because he “would prefer more educated voters than a greater increase in the number of voters.” The idea of all Americans voting, especially African Americans, is something Republicans cannot countenance and like all Republicans, Millar hopes “it can be stopped.” The idea of not supporting, and indeed destroying, democracy is by all appearance now a major policy position of the conservative movement.
This anti-democracy crusade is not reserved to the Koch brothers’ legislative arms in the former Confederacy. A couple of weeks ago New Jersey Governor Chris Christie went on a rant condemning democracy as “shocking, underhanded, and a dirty tactic” and yet there was little response from Democrats at the national or state level. If, as Democrats claim, the fast-approaching midterm elections are critical to Americans, why are they not revealing the Koch-Republican dirty assault on democracy? For dog’s sake, Republicans have spent the past five years falsely accusing the President and Democrats of “destroying the Constitution” and attempting to rule as dictators.
These Republican, ALEC, Americans for Prosperity, and Koch brother attacks on America’s democracy are not solely targeting African Americans; they are targeting working-class Americans who are working longer hours to survive and have issues making it to the polls on Election Day. Regardless if it is eliminating early voting, sending out phony polling place and voter registration information, or threatening armed intimidation of voters, Republicans are attacking America’s fragile democracy.
It is, frankly, astonishing that Republicans are openly working to restrict all Americans’ right to vote with little pushback from Democrats because the concept of democracy is allegedly the defining feature of “American exceptionalism.” Regardless of any Americans’ political leanings, it is difficult to imagine that only die-hard theocrats and corporatists would condone destroying democracy, but it is just as difficult to comprehend why Democrats are not making the Republicans’ effort a major campaign issue; particularly in former Confederate states where Republicans are actively touting their efforts to restrict democracy to white, Christian, and Republican supporters.
Democrats need to come to their senses and put half the effort into informing Americans about the Republican attack on this nation’s democracy as they do promising to fight for middle-class Americans. Because at the rate Republicans are destroying democracy, Democrats are doomed to do nothing for the people because the Kochs, AFP, ALEC, and Republicans are easily eliminating Democrats’ chances of remaining in office by killing democracy with little to no opposition.
...................................................................................................................................................................
Seems to me that the GOP is a "real social ill"
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GOP Congressman Warns Of The Real Social Ill Destroying American Values: Marijuana
By Elise Foley, September 26, 2014
Conservatives are losing ground on the fight to keep marijuana illegal, a Republican congressman warned in dire terms at the Values Voter Summit.
During a conference mostly focused on religious liberty, abolishing the IRS and promoting small government, Rep. John Fleming (R-La.) delivered a full speech on the ills of decriminalizing and legalizing marijuana.
Fleming, a medical doctor, warned of a "growing acceptance" of marijuana -- a fact hard to deny, considering public opinion and state laws. Colorado and Washington state have legalized recreational marijuana, and 23 states and the District of Columbia have allowed the substance for medical use.
"The time for us to speak up on this issue is now," Fleming told the crowd of conservatives.
Fleming linked marijuana to deaths and domestic violence and said legalization supporters spread lies that marijuana is not addictive. Most supporters don't actually say it can't be addictive.
Of course, those ills apply even more so to alcohol. Asked about the comparison after his speech, Fleming acknowledged that there are problems with alcohol, but said it has been accepted by the culture for thousands of years, making prohibition "obviously problematic." The same social acceptance doesn't exist for marijuana, he said, echoing an argument he has made before.
"If you and I accept the fact that alcohol is a problem and a danger, is it logical to say, 'Well, instead of having one problem, that we should have two problems?'" he asked reporters after his speech. "Why add a second one if one is already causing problems?"
Fleming also dismissed the argument by advocates of legalization that it would allow states to collect significant amounts of tax revenue. A study released this month by personal finance site NerdWallet estimated that states would bring in a total $3.1 billion each year if they legalized marijuana.
The congressman said that more revenue may come in, but the cost of dealing with health issues, larger homeless populations and other social ills would make legal marijuana a net loss. (Whether Colorado's pot laws have actually drawn more homeless people is unclear.)
Fleming said he thinks efforts to keep marijuana illegal seem to be working -- at least to some degree. A recent study from the Public Religion Research Institute found that support for legalizing marijuana nationwide had dropped from 51 percent in 2013 to 44 percent this year.
But Fleming lamented that marijuana supporters remain unconvinced that the drug is dangerous.
"I'll show them the real science, and they just don't want to believe it because quite frankly, they want to smoke marijuana," Fleming said. "It's like if you're overweight. Who wants to cut back on eating when you enjoy eating? But it's still bad for your health."
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GOP Congressman Warns Of The Real Social Ill Destroying American Values: Marijuana
By Elise Foley, September 26, 2014
Conservatives are losing ground on the fight to keep marijuana illegal, a Republican congressman warned in dire terms at the Values Voter Summit.
During a conference mostly focused on religious liberty, abolishing the IRS and promoting small government, Rep. John Fleming (R-La.) delivered a full speech on the ills of decriminalizing and legalizing marijuana.
Fleming, a medical doctor, warned of a "growing acceptance" of marijuana -- a fact hard to deny, considering public opinion and state laws. Colorado and Washington state have legalized recreational marijuana, and 23 states and the District of Columbia have allowed the substance for medical use.
"The time for us to speak up on this issue is now," Fleming told the crowd of conservatives.
Fleming linked marijuana to deaths and domestic violence and said legalization supporters spread lies that marijuana is not addictive. Most supporters don't actually say it can't be addictive.
Of course, those ills apply even more so to alcohol. Asked about the comparison after his speech, Fleming acknowledged that there are problems with alcohol, but said it has been accepted by the culture for thousands of years, making prohibition "obviously problematic." The same social acceptance doesn't exist for marijuana, he said, echoing an argument he has made before.
"If you and I accept the fact that alcohol is a problem and a danger, is it logical to say, 'Well, instead of having one problem, that we should have two problems?'" he asked reporters after his speech. "Why add a second one if one is already causing problems?"
Fleming also dismissed the argument by advocates of legalization that it would allow states to collect significant amounts of tax revenue. A study released this month by personal finance site NerdWallet estimated that states would bring in a total $3.1 billion each year if they legalized marijuana.
The congressman said that more revenue may come in, but the cost of dealing with health issues, larger homeless populations and other social ills would make legal marijuana a net loss. (Whether Colorado's pot laws have actually drawn more homeless people is unclear.)
Fleming said he thinks efforts to keep marijuana illegal seem to be working -- at least to some degree. A recent study from the Public Religion Research Institute found that support for legalizing marijuana nationwide had dropped from 51 percent in 2013 to 44 percent this year.
But Fleming lamented that marijuana supporters remain unconvinced that the drug is dangerous.
"I'll show them the real science, and they just don't want to believe it because quite frankly, they want to smoke marijuana," Fleming said. "It's like if you're overweight. Who wants to cut back on eating when you enjoy eating? But it's still bad for your health."
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Republicans never learn
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Congressional Candidate Makes Exact Same Disastrous Error As Mitt Romney
By Josh Israel, September 24, 2014
In 2012, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign was seriously damaged when Mother Jones posted a bootlegged video of him at a fundraiser telling donors that the 47 percent of the nation that pays no federal income tax would vote for President Obama because they are “dependent upon government.” Though Romney lost Nevada by more than 6 points on Election Day, one of his endorsers has resurrected the controversial strategy.
In a video posted Tuesday by the Nevada Democrat Party, Assemblyman Cresent Hardy (R), who is the GOP nominee against first-term Rep. Steven Horsford (D) in Nevada’s 4th Congressional District, endorsed Romney’s comments and said the problem is actually worse today. Asked about the concern that we are “not that far from the tipping point, where the private sector is gonna be able to support the federal sector,” Hardy responded, “Can I say that without getting in trouble like President… err, Governor Romney? The 47 percent is true. It’s bigger now.”
Watch the video:
At least two of Hardy’s highest profile supporters, Nevada Senator Dean Heller (R) and Governor Brian Sandoval (R) were among the many Republicans to distance themselves from Romney’s 2012 remarks. Neither immediately responded to a ThinkProgress inquiry about their reactions to Hardy’s statement.
Beyond being impolitic, the 47 percent claim was highly misleading. The bulk of those paying no federal income tax are working poor (who still pay federal payroll tax, and state or local sales taxes, gas taxes, and excise taxes), senior citizens, and students. As of 2011, just 7 percent of the country was non-elderly and had no federal tax liability, and most of them made less than $20,000.
Hardy has taken some other notable stances. At a meet-and-greet last Thursday, he reportedly “blamed women, minorities and young voters for problems in the United States by electing President Barack Obama.” He later said the remarks were taken out of context.
He has also been vocal about his opposition to LGBT equality. In February, the Las Vegas Sun quoted him explaining is anti-LGBT views. He vowed he would “always vote against same sex marriage because of my religious beliefs, the way I was raised.” He also said he would oppose the Employment Non-Discrimination Act because “continuing to create these laws that are what I call segregation laws, it puts one class of a person over another.”
In May, Hardy boasted on his campaign Facebook page that Mitt Romney endorsed his candidacy.
The 4th district is about 4 points more Democratic, on average, than the rest of the country and the House Republican’s campaign arm has targeted the seat as “competitive.”
Hardy is not the first 2014 candidate to land in hot water over comments embracing the 47 percent language. In July, a 2010 video surfaced of Colorado Republican gubernatorial nominee Bob Beauprez complaining to an audience of Rotarians that 47 percent of Americans pay no taxes, so “we’ve got almost half the population perfectly happy that somebody else is paying the bill, and most of that half is you all.”
...................................................................................................................................................................
Congressional Candidate Makes Exact Same Disastrous Error As Mitt Romney
By Josh Israel, September 24, 2014
In 2012, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign was seriously damaged when Mother Jones posted a bootlegged video of him at a fundraiser telling donors that the 47 percent of the nation that pays no federal income tax would vote for President Obama because they are “dependent upon government.” Though Romney lost Nevada by more than 6 points on Election Day, one of his endorsers has resurrected the controversial strategy.
In a video posted Tuesday by the Nevada Democrat Party, Assemblyman Cresent Hardy (R), who is the GOP nominee against first-term Rep. Steven Horsford (D) in Nevada’s 4th Congressional District, endorsed Romney’s comments and said the problem is actually worse today. Asked about the concern that we are “not that far from the tipping point, where the private sector is gonna be able to support the federal sector,” Hardy responded, “Can I say that without getting in trouble like President… err, Governor Romney? The 47 percent is true. It’s bigger now.”
Watch the video:
At least two of Hardy’s highest profile supporters, Nevada Senator Dean Heller (R) and Governor Brian Sandoval (R) were among the many Republicans to distance themselves from Romney’s 2012 remarks. Neither immediately responded to a ThinkProgress inquiry about their reactions to Hardy’s statement.
Beyond being impolitic, the 47 percent claim was highly misleading. The bulk of those paying no federal income tax are working poor (who still pay federal payroll tax, and state or local sales taxes, gas taxes, and excise taxes), senior citizens, and students. As of 2011, just 7 percent of the country was non-elderly and had no federal tax liability, and most of them made less than $20,000.
Hardy has taken some other notable stances. At a meet-and-greet last Thursday, he reportedly “blamed women, minorities and young voters for problems in the United States by electing President Barack Obama.” He later said the remarks were taken out of context.
He has also been vocal about his opposition to LGBT equality. In February, the Las Vegas Sun quoted him explaining is anti-LGBT views. He vowed he would “always vote against same sex marriage because of my religious beliefs, the way I was raised.” He also said he would oppose the Employment Non-Discrimination Act because “continuing to create these laws that are what I call segregation laws, it puts one class of a person over another.”
In May, Hardy boasted on his campaign Facebook page that Mitt Romney endorsed his candidacy.
The 4th district is about 4 points more Democratic, on average, than the rest of the country and the House Republican’s campaign arm has targeted the seat as “competitive.”
Hardy is not the first 2014 candidate to land in hot water over comments embracing the 47 percent language. In July, a 2010 video surfaced of Colorado Republican gubernatorial nominee Bob Beauprez complaining to an audience of Rotarians that 47 percent of Americans pay no taxes, so “we’ve got almost half the population perfectly happy that somebody else is paying the bill, and most of that half is you all.”
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Sunday, September 28, 2014
" The goal of first-party organizing is to have at least one that is worth a damn. At least one that truly owes its allegiance to the people."
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Why we need to choose politics’ Door No. 4
We’re sick of politics, but we can fix it.
By Mike McCabe, September 27, 2014
Americans clearly are sour on politics. According [to] the latest Gallup public opinion polling, the number one problem in the U.S. is “dissatisfaction with government, Congress and politicians” along with “poor leadership, corruption and abuse of power.”
New Associated Press polling shows slightly more than a quarter of Americans say they trust Republicans to manage the government, while just under a quarter trust the Democrats. The biggest bloc of citizens say they don’t trust either major party. And the AP survey showed that public confidence in the government’s ability to make progress on the important problems and issues facing the country continues to slip, with 74 percent now saying they have little or no confidence, down from 70 percent who said the same last December.
Both parties are failing our country, leaving most Americans feeling betrayed and politically homeless. But the citizenry’s response to these circumstances leaves the most to be desired.
We’ve all been conditioned to believe we have only three options. Behind Door No. 1 is whatever the two major parties offer up. A few partisans on either side are more or less satisfied with what’s behind this door, but most Americans aren’t. Most feel they are forced to hold their noses and choose between the lesser of evils. Most look for another door.
Behind Door No. 2 is an occasional third-party or independent candidate. But whether it’s Ross Perot one time or Ralph Nader another, this door leads to a dead end. The U.S. is not a parliamentary democracy. Ours is a two-party system. Supporting a third party invariably ends in disappointment.
That leaves Door No. 3. Behind it is resignation. Sadly, a great many of us are choosing this route, throwing up our hands in disgust and hightailing it for the sidelines. This withdrawal from civic life is now endemic to American politics.
Three doors. No happy ending to be found behind any of them.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that there is a fourth door. We’ve been trained not to recognize it or even acknowledge its existence, much less open it. But it is there all the same. It hasn’t been opened in our lifetimes, but when it was found and opened by past generations, what it led to was transformational and landscape altering.
Door No. 4 is what I call a first-party movement. Third-party movements operate on the political fringes, to the left of the Democrats and to the right of the Republicans. Put another way, they seek to clip the wings of the major parties. First-party insurgencies go for the heart. They compete for the affections of the entire electorate.
The goal of third-party movements is to have three or more parties. The goal of first-party organizing is to have at least one that is worth a damn. At least one that truly owes its allegiance to the people.
Conditions are growing ripe for an extensive renovation of the nation’s political landscape. The telltale signs of an impending political implosion are visible. The percentage of Americans who refuse to identify with either major parties is at its highest level in three-quarters of a century. The biggest swath of the electorate — by far — is not the Republican loyalists or the Democratic faithful. Nor is it centrist or moderate. It is politically homeless.
If Door No. 4 is opened, the two parties will either adapt or perish. The odds that at least one of the parties will cease to exist in its current form are getting shorter by the day.
We have it in our power to put citizens back in the driver’s seat of our government. The two major parties are repellent. We have it in our power to build a political household that people actually want to live in. It can be done. Our great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents did it. On more than one occasion they opened door number four and freed themselves from the same kinds of traps that ensnare us again today.
We don’t have to make history. We only have to repeat it.
...................................................................................................................................................................
Why we need to choose politics’ Door No. 4
We’re sick of politics, but we can fix it.
By Mike McCabe, September 27, 2014
Americans clearly are sour on politics. According [to] the latest Gallup public opinion polling, the number one problem in the U.S. is “dissatisfaction with government, Congress and politicians” along with “poor leadership, corruption and abuse of power.”
New Associated Press polling shows slightly more than a quarter of Americans say they trust Republicans to manage the government, while just under a quarter trust the Democrats. The biggest bloc of citizens say they don’t trust either major party. And the AP survey showed that public confidence in the government’s ability to make progress on the important problems and issues facing the country continues to slip, with 74 percent now saying they have little or no confidence, down from 70 percent who said the same last December.
Both parties are failing our country, leaving most Americans feeling betrayed and politically homeless. But the citizenry’s response to these circumstances leaves the most to be desired.
We’ve all been conditioned to believe we have only three options. Behind Door No. 1 is whatever the two major parties offer up. A few partisans on either side are more or less satisfied with what’s behind this door, but most Americans aren’t. Most feel they are forced to hold their noses and choose between the lesser of evils. Most look for another door.
Behind Door No. 2 is an occasional third-party or independent candidate. But whether it’s Ross Perot one time or Ralph Nader another, this door leads to a dead end. The U.S. is not a parliamentary democracy. Ours is a two-party system. Supporting a third party invariably ends in disappointment.
That leaves Door No. 3. Behind it is resignation. Sadly, a great many of us are choosing this route, throwing up our hands in disgust and hightailing it for the sidelines. This withdrawal from civic life is now endemic to American politics.
Three doors. No happy ending to be found behind any of them.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that there is a fourth door. We’ve been trained not to recognize it or even acknowledge its existence, much less open it. But it is there all the same. It hasn’t been opened in our lifetimes, but when it was found and opened by past generations, what it led to was transformational and landscape altering.
Door No. 4 is what I call a first-party movement. Third-party movements operate on the political fringes, to the left of the Democrats and to the right of the Republicans. Put another way, they seek to clip the wings of the major parties. First-party insurgencies go for the heart. They compete for the affections of the entire electorate.
The goal of third-party movements is to have three or more parties. The goal of first-party organizing is to have at least one that is worth a damn. At least one that truly owes its allegiance to the people.
Conditions are growing ripe for an extensive renovation of the nation’s political landscape. The telltale signs of an impending political implosion are visible. The percentage of Americans who refuse to identify with either major parties is at its highest level in three-quarters of a century. The biggest swath of the electorate — by far — is not the Republican loyalists or the Democratic faithful. Nor is it centrist or moderate. It is politically homeless.
If Door No. 4 is opened, the two parties will either adapt or perish. The odds that at least one of the parties will cease to exist in its current form are getting shorter by the day.
We have it in our power to put citizens back in the driver’s seat of our government. The two major parties are repellent. We have it in our power to build a political household that people actually want to live in. It can be done. Our great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents did it. On more than one occasion they opened door number four and freed themselves from the same kinds of traps that ensnare us again today.
We don’t have to make history. We only have to repeat it.
...................................................................................................................................................................
The "right-wing media twists itself into knots stoking outrage over the long-discredited myth of 'death panels' ..."
...................................................................................................................................................................
Conservative Media Revive Death Panel Myth Amid Good Obamacare News
By Alexandrea Boguhn, September 26, 2014
Conservative media attempted to revive the "death panels" zombie lie amid several weeks of good news about the Affordable Care Act's (ACA) success.
In a September 17 piece for The Atlantic, former White House health care adviser Ezekiel J. Emanuel outlined his opinions on end of life healthcare and argued that 75 is the ideal age to die.
Right-wing media jumped on Emanuel's comments as an opportunity to resuscitate the thoroughly debunked claim that the ACA would create "death panels" to ration health care and slow the growth of medical costs.
A September 24 post from National Review Online claimed that Emanuel's Atlantic article demonstrated that conservative warnings that the ACA was "a first step toward medical rationing" were plausible: "Read Emanuel's diatribe against living too long, and suddenly Sarah Palin's attack on Obamacare's "death panels" does not seem so far-fetched."
Fox News also used Emmanuel's comments as an opportunity to discuss "death panels" in a September 26 segment on Fox & Friends. Responding to Emmanuel's suggestion that there is an ideal time to die, Fox contributor Dr. Marc Siegel asked if that means they should "write off" patients at a certain age, suggesting the Post Office or IRS may one day get to make that decision. Co-host Steve Doocy added, "Maybe you're talking about those death panels that have been rumored for so long."
[Video]
While right-wing media twists itself into knots stoking outrage over the long-discredited myth of "death panels," actual news reports have recently underlined the ACA's successes.
On September 18, the Obama administration announced that 7.3 million Americans had enrolled in health insurance plans through the Obamacare exchanges and paid their premiums -- a number that is "much higher than the 6 million that the Congressional Budget Office forecast would be covered this year," Politico noted, and debunks conservative allegations that the administration is "cooking the books."
But this wasn't the only good news for the health care law. Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell recently reported that the ACA has reduced the amount of uninsured people in the United States by 26 percent. A recent report from the Commonwealth Fund also found that the health care law had decreased the uninsured rate by as much as 13 percent among Latinos, a group that has "historically suffered the highest uninsurance rate in the U.S," according to the Huffington Post.
...................................................................................................................................................................
Conservative Media Revive Death Panel Myth Amid Good Obamacare News
By Alexandrea Boguhn, September 26, 2014
Conservative media attempted to revive the "death panels" zombie lie amid several weeks of good news about the Affordable Care Act's (ACA) success.
In a September 17 piece for The Atlantic, former White House health care adviser Ezekiel J. Emanuel outlined his opinions on end of life healthcare and argued that 75 is the ideal age to die.
Right-wing media jumped on Emanuel's comments as an opportunity to resuscitate the thoroughly debunked claim that the ACA would create "death panels" to ration health care and slow the growth of medical costs.
A September 24 post from National Review Online claimed that Emanuel's Atlantic article demonstrated that conservative warnings that the ACA was "a first step toward medical rationing" were plausible: "Read Emanuel's diatribe against living too long, and suddenly Sarah Palin's attack on Obamacare's "death panels" does not seem so far-fetched."
Fox News also used Emmanuel's comments as an opportunity to discuss "death panels" in a September 26 segment on Fox & Friends. Responding to Emmanuel's suggestion that there is an ideal time to die, Fox contributor Dr. Marc Siegel asked if that means they should "write off" patients at a certain age, suggesting the Post Office or IRS may one day get to make that decision. Co-host Steve Doocy added, "Maybe you're talking about those death panels that have been rumored for so long."
[Video]
While right-wing media twists itself into knots stoking outrage over the long-discredited myth of "death panels," actual news reports have recently underlined the ACA's successes.
On September 18, the Obama administration announced that 7.3 million Americans had enrolled in health insurance plans through the Obamacare exchanges and paid their premiums -- a number that is "much higher than the 6 million that the Congressional Budget Office forecast would be covered this year," Politico noted, and debunks conservative allegations that the administration is "cooking the books."
But this wasn't the only good news for the health care law. Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell recently reported that the ACA has reduced the amount of uninsured people in the United States by 26 percent. A recent report from the Commonwealth Fund also found that the health care law had decreased the uninsured rate by as much as 13 percent among Latinos, a group that has "historically suffered the highest uninsurance rate in the U.S," according to the Huffington Post.
...................................................................................................................................................................
"... [George ] Will runs cover for the Koch brothers' Iowa spending ..." and doesn't disclose his conflict of interest. For shame, George!
...................................................................................................................................................................
Conflict Of Interest: George Will Again Uses His Column To Prop Up A Koch-Backed Candidate
By Ben Dimiero, September 27, 2014
Weeks after appearing at a VIP dinner for the Koch brothers-backed political group Americans for Prosperity (AFP), George Will devoted his Washington Post column to promoting one of the Kochs' favored political candidates without disclosing the conflict of interest.
Last month, Politico reported on Will's attendance at a private dinner featuring an "exclusive group of major donors and VIPs" as part of AFP's Defending the American Dream summit. Despite repeated attempts by Media Matters, neither Will nor AFP would answer whether he had been paid for the appearance or compensated for his travel expenses. Will has repeatedly devoted column space in the past to promoting Koch-backed candidates and policy issues.
When the journalism group Society of Professional Journalists released its new Code of Ethics in September, the group's ethics chair cited Will's relationship with AFP -- and his refusal to disclose whether he had been paid by the group -- as the type of conflict journalists should try to avoid.
Apparently undeterred, in his September 26 column, Will sang the praises of Republican Iowa Senate candidate Joni Ernst -- a candidate who has received massive financial support from the Kochs and their political groups -- without disclosing his conflict of interest.
In his column, Will lamented that the contest between Ernst and Democratic challenger Bruce Braley "should not be this close." He dismissed Democrats' "War on Women" narrative and asserted that Braley "is as awkward as Ernst is ebullient when campaigning."
Pointing to spending by outside groups on Braley's behalf, Will classified the Iowa Democrat's "fretting about money in politics" as being "notably selective," and wrote that although "politics is an inherently transactional business," Braley is "operatically indignant about the Koch brothers."
Though Will runs cover for the Koch brothers' Iowa spending, their influence in the race is not so easily shrugged off.
This year, Americans for Prosperity has launched several ad campaigns targeting Braley in Iowa. The Des Moines Register reported earlier this month that another Koch-supported political group, Freedom Partners Action Fund, had also launched a "million-dollar TV ad campaign" targeting Braley.
According to Huffington Post reporter Sam Stein, in June, Ernst appeared at a "secretive conference" held by the Koch brothers, where she heaped praise on the assembled deep-pocketed attendees and credited "the exposure to this group and to this network" for having "really started my trajectory." Citing "figures provided by a Democratic tracker," Stein wrote that four different Koch-funded political groups had "blanketed the airwaves" in Iowa, to the tune of "roughly $3.4 million."
Stein added, "A few days after Ernst's appearance, Charles Koch, his wife, his son and his daughter-in-law each gave the Iowa candidate the legal maximum contribution of $2,600."
Will has repeatedly crossed ethical lines when it comes to disclosing his conflicts of interest in his Post column.
...................................................................................................................................................................
Conflict Of Interest: George Will Again Uses His Column To Prop Up A Koch-Backed Candidate
By Ben Dimiero, September 27, 2014
Weeks after appearing at a VIP dinner for the Koch brothers-backed political group Americans for Prosperity (AFP), George Will devoted his Washington Post column to promoting one of the Kochs' favored political candidates without disclosing the conflict of interest.
Last month, Politico reported on Will's attendance at a private dinner featuring an "exclusive group of major donors and VIPs" as part of AFP's Defending the American Dream summit. Despite repeated attempts by Media Matters, neither Will nor AFP would answer whether he had been paid for the appearance or compensated for his travel expenses. Will has repeatedly devoted column space in the past to promoting Koch-backed candidates and policy issues.
When the journalism group Society of Professional Journalists released its new Code of Ethics in September, the group's ethics chair cited Will's relationship with AFP -- and his refusal to disclose whether he had been paid by the group -- as the type of conflict journalists should try to avoid.
Apparently undeterred, in his September 26 column, Will sang the praises of Republican Iowa Senate candidate Joni Ernst -- a candidate who has received massive financial support from the Kochs and their political groups -- without disclosing his conflict of interest.
In his column, Will lamented that the contest between Ernst and Democratic challenger Bruce Braley "should not be this close." He dismissed Democrats' "War on Women" narrative and asserted that Braley "is as awkward as Ernst is ebullient when campaigning."
Pointing to spending by outside groups on Braley's behalf, Will classified the Iowa Democrat's "fretting about money in politics" as being "notably selective," and wrote that although "politics is an inherently transactional business," Braley is "operatically indignant about the Koch brothers."
Though Will runs cover for the Koch brothers' Iowa spending, their influence in the race is not so easily shrugged off.
This year, Americans for Prosperity has launched several ad campaigns targeting Braley in Iowa. The Des Moines Register reported earlier this month that another Koch-supported political group, Freedom Partners Action Fund, had also launched a "million-dollar TV ad campaign" targeting Braley.
According to Huffington Post reporter Sam Stein, in June, Ernst appeared at a "secretive conference" held by the Koch brothers, where she heaped praise on the assembled deep-pocketed attendees and credited "the exposure to this group and to this network" for having "really started my trajectory." Citing "figures provided by a Democratic tracker," Stein wrote that four different Koch-funded political groups had "blanketed the airwaves" in Iowa, to the tune of "roughly $3.4 million."
Stein added, "A few days after Ernst's appearance, Charles Koch, his wife, his son and his daughter-in-law each gave the Iowa candidate the legal maximum contribution of $2,600."
Will has repeatedly crossed ethical lines when it comes to disclosing his conflicts of interest in his Post column.
...................................................................................................................................................................
Anarchy? Really, Ben?
...................................................................................................................................................................
Top Republican Presidential Candidate Says Anarchy May Force Cancellation Of 2016 Election
By Josh Israel, September 28, 2014
Dr. Ben Carson, a popular Tea Party activist and Fox News contributor who says he will likely seek the Republican nomination for president in 2016, said on Sunday that he is seriously concerned that there will not be 2016 elections in the United States because the country could be in anarchy by that point. His reasons: the growing national debt, ISIS, and the U.S. Senate’s refusal to consider legislation passed by the GOP-controlled House of Representatives.
Host Chris Wallace noted that in light of his potential presidential campaign, Carson’s previous comments were now under a greater spotlight. He noted Carson’s August comment that if the Republicans don’t win a majority in the Senate this year, the 2016 elections might not even be held and asked the retired neurosurgeon if he stood by it:
Carson finished a close second Saturday in a straw poll at the 2014 Values Voters Summit for 2016 presidential preferences.
Despite Carson’s fears, the United States has held presidential elections every four years since 1788, despite a civil war, two world wars, and a great depression. Carson has been no stranger to controversial comments since he became active in politics. In March of 2013, he compared same-sex marriage to bestiality and NAMBLA. That October, he decried the Affordable Care Act as “the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery,” adding that the law “is slavery, in a way.” And earlier this month, Carson defended former Baltimore Raven Ray Rice, saying people should stop “demonizing” him and suggesting that his wife also shared some of the blame for being attacked, opining that “they both need some help.”
...................................................................................................................................................................
Top Republican Presidential Candidate Says Anarchy May Force Cancellation Of 2016 Election
By Josh Israel, September 28, 2014
Dr. Ben Carson, a popular Tea Party activist and Fox News contributor who says he will likely seek the Republican nomination for president in 2016, said on Sunday that he is seriously concerned that there will not be 2016 elections in the United States because the country could be in anarchy by that point. His reasons: the growing national debt, ISIS, and the U.S. Senate’s refusal to consider legislation passed by the GOP-controlled House of Representatives.
Host Chris Wallace noted that in light of his potential presidential campaign, Carson’s previous comments were now under a greater spotlight. He noted Carson’s August comment that if the Republicans don’t win a majority in the Senate this year, the 2016 elections might not even be held and asked the retired neurosurgeon if he stood by it:
WALLACE: You said recently that there might not even be elections in 2016 because of widespread anarchy. Do you really believe that?Carson then noted that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has “over three hundred bills sitting on his desk” that he won’t bring to the floor for a vote, “thereby thwarting the will of the people.” He made no mention of the Republican House’s refusal to consider popular Senate-passed bipartisan measures like comprehensive immigration reform and the Employment Non-Discrimination Act.
CARSON: I hope that that’s not going to be the case. But certainly there’s the potential because you have to recognize that we have a rapidly increasing national debt, a very unstable financial foundation, and you have all these things going on like the ISIS crisis that could very rapidly change things that are going on in our nation. And unless we begin to deal with these things in a comprehensive way and in a logical way there is no telling what could happen in just a couple of years.
Carson finished a close second Saturday in a straw poll at the 2014 Values Voters Summit for 2016 presidential preferences.
Despite Carson’s fears, the United States has held presidential elections every four years since 1788, despite a civil war, two world wars, and a great depression. Carson has been no stranger to controversial comments since he became active in politics. In March of 2013, he compared same-sex marriage to bestiality and NAMBLA. That October, he decried the Affordable Care Act as “the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery,” adding that the law “is slavery, in a way.” And earlier this month, Carson defended former Baltimore Raven Ray Rice, saying people should stop “demonizing” him and suggesting that his wife also shared some of the blame for being attacked, opining that “they both need some help.”
...................................................................................................................................................................
"... voters are slowly losing access to their voting rights."
...................................................................................................................................................................
Why Voting Machines Are About To Wreak Havoc On Another Election
By Lauren C. Williams, September 26, 2014
In 2012, hundreds of thousands of people across the U.S. waited, at first patiently and then with growing frustration, in lines that ventured out the doors and wrapped around street corners. They weren’t waiting more than seven hours in line to buy the new iPhone — they were waiting to vote on an electronic touch-screen machine.
Technology has made life easier, simplifying common tasks such as banking, publishing a book, talking to friends and paying for things online. But when it comes to voting, technology is stuck in 2002. And with the decade-old electronic voting machines that states use falling apart — creating long lines that cause some not vote at all — voters are slowly losing access to their voting rights.
There’s been renewed emphasis on voting rights in the last year, since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a key portion of the Voting Rights Act. The Court ruled that voter discrimination wasn’t rampant enough to support a law restricting Southern states from implementing new voting policies. Since then, states, particularly Republican-run states, have been fighting for voting restrictions like reduced early voting times and voter ID laws, laws that previously would have been blocked by the federal government.
Civil rights advocates contend that such laws, especially those requiring all voters to present government identification, could potentially disenfranchise the poor and people of color and reduce voter turnout.
Where a voter lives can dictate whether or not he or she can quickly go to the polls before work or spend the better part of the day waiting in line to cast a ballot. City voters, who tend to be Democrats, are more likely to encounter long lines due to voting restrictions, according to a 2012 report from The New York Times. And the poorer voters are, the more likely they are to stand in long lines to exercise their voting rights.
But even without ID laws, voters face obstacles at polling centers having to wait hours to vote in some regions partly because of outdated and too few electronic voting machines.
“More affluent counties and cities are able to spend more on election administration. And so they have more staff, they have better machines,” said Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. “And places with lower incomes and a weaker tax base just don’t have the funds to replace the equipment and hire the staff they might like…So voters end up getting served differentially, you know, depending on where they live.”
According to a new report from the Brennan Center for Justice, Black and Latino voters had to wait the longest to vote and had fewer machines to vote on. The study, which looks at voter access in Maryland, South Carolina and Florida, found that too few poll workers and electronic voting machines contributed to long lines and delays. For example, in South Carolina, there were almost twice as many voters per voting machine or poll worker in some counties than allowed by state law.
Lines are longest when waiting for electronic voting machines in part because only one voter can use them at a time and it takes everyone a few moments to figure out how they work, said voting rights activist Rebecca Wilson.
“Besides the fact that a lot of states are left in the lurch with equipment that’s breaking down, that’s unreliable — [Maryland] had to pull machines out of circulation in the middle of an election because the test screen goes out of calibration,” Wilson said. That means the screen would register a voter’s touch about an inch below the candidate he or she selected, potentially casting a vote for the wrong candidate. “And there’s no telling what’s getting reported,” she said.
Barbara Simons, former IBM programmer and voting technology expert, added that voters are then left with machines with faulty software that are prone to crashes, and are otherwise “physically falling apart” because they are so old, contributing to long lines.
During the 2012 presidential election, Florida also suffered from long wait times — up to six hours in some polling places — that disproportionately affected the state’s large Latino population. But the state and its voting practices have been swirling in controversy before.
Fourteen years ago, it took an entire month for Americans to find out who they had elected to succeed then-President Bill Clinton (D-AR). The ballots in Florida had to be recounted during the 2000 presidential election largely due to failed voting technology that caused votes to not get counted, or incorrect votes.
One of the main culprits was the punch card machine, which registered votes by poking a hole through the paper ballot. But the machines failed to make a clean hole, and votes weren’t registered by ballot readers. The butterfly ballot also complicated the 2000 election, causing voters to pick the wrong candidate because of its overwhelming two-page design.
That election controversially put George W. Bush into the presidency, who lost the popular vote to former Vice President Al Gore. And Florida’s votes were key, not only because it was a swing state, but because the unreliable voting technology it used.
“The 2000 [presidential] election in Florida spotlighted all kinds of problems with voting technology: The design of ballots, the way ballots are counted, the problems with things like punch card ballots, which got all of the attention then,” Burden said.
As a result, President Bush enacted a wave a reforms including the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which required states to upgrade their voting equipment from the punch cards and lever machines that plagued the 2000 election. States then “went on a spending spree” with millions of federal dollars, buying state-of-the-art touch screen voting machines, also known as DREs (direct-recording electronic voting machines), Burden said. States also bought optical scan machines, where voters mark their paper ballot choices by filling out a bubble or connecting arrows. The results are read by a machine, similar to how SAT tests are processed.
“But that was ten years ago, over ten years ago,” Burden said. “And I think anybody who has a personal computer knows that after 10 years it’s time to move on.”
There’s nothing to move on to. Most states are in the midst of a budget crises and can’t afford to upgrade machines, points out Wendy Underhill, director of the National Conference of State Legislatures in Denver.
“It’s difficult to replace them. The main issue is money. They bought them with federal money, and that money is not coming back. In some cases the states pay for but it’s usually the county that pays for it,” Underhill said. “They have to go to their accounting commissioners and argue that it’s a priority but it’s sometimes hard to make the case when you’re up against school needs and [buildings damaged by] fires, etc.”
Voters will certainly have some kind of equipment to cast their votes come Election Day in November, Underhill assured. But while the aging equipment will be ready to use, voters may simply decide it’s not worth the wait. During the last federal election, in 2012, about 201,000 Floridians decided not to vote because of the long lines, according to an Orlando Sentinel analysis.
Even without budget constraints, states looking to replace the crumbling machines can’t. “Unfortunately a lot of the vendors for those machines have gone out of business,” Burden said. Now, there are only a few big vendors, “and many of them are not servicing or offering the type of equipment that states currently have,” because they want states to spend millions to buy the newer models, he said.
So the aging machines get pulled out for Election Day and, if they break down or become untrustworthy, poll workers will shove them back in storage. States make do with what they have, pulling old equipment such as the questionable lever voting machines. “They know how to refurbish equipment, bring it in from other locations, cannibalize equipment,” Underhill said.
There’s also an outstanding question as to whether electronic machines are trustworthy in the first place. Voting technology experts aren’t keen on letting voters use systems that have even the slightest possibility of being compromised. To ensure people are able to exercise their voting rights, Simons said, there must be a way to check over each entry because the electronic machines can have bugs or bad lines of code just like a personal laptop.
All major tech companies, such as Apple, frequently send out bug fixes, most of which are security patches. “So the idea that someone is going to produce a voting machine that won’t have software bugs, that won’t be able to be hacked — there’s no way,” Simons said.
[major, major snippage]
...................................................................................................................................................................
Why Voting Machines Are About To Wreak Havoc On Another Election
By Lauren C. Williams, September 26, 2014
In 2012, hundreds of thousands of people across the U.S. waited, at first patiently and then with growing frustration, in lines that ventured out the doors and wrapped around street corners. They weren’t waiting more than seven hours in line to buy the new iPhone — they were waiting to vote on an electronic touch-screen machine.
Technology has made life easier, simplifying common tasks such as banking, publishing a book, talking to friends and paying for things online. But when it comes to voting, technology is stuck in 2002. And with the decade-old electronic voting machines that states use falling apart — creating long lines that cause some not vote at all — voters are slowly losing access to their voting rights.
There’s been renewed emphasis on voting rights in the last year, since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a key portion of the Voting Rights Act. The Court ruled that voter discrimination wasn’t rampant enough to support a law restricting Southern states from implementing new voting policies. Since then, states, particularly Republican-run states, have been fighting for voting restrictions like reduced early voting times and voter ID laws, laws that previously would have been blocked by the federal government.
Civil rights advocates contend that such laws, especially those requiring all voters to present government identification, could potentially disenfranchise the poor and people of color and reduce voter turnout.
Where a voter lives can dictate whether or not he or she can quickly go to the polls before work or spend the better part of the day waiting in line to cast a ballot. City voters, who tend to be Democrats, are more likely to encounter long lines due to voting restrictions, according to a 2012 report from The New York Times. And the poorer voters are, the more likely they are to stand in long lines to exercise their voting rights.
But even without ID laws, voters face obstacles at polling centers having to wait hours to vote in some regions partly because of outdated and too few electronic voting machines.
“More affluent counties and cities are able to spend more on election administration. And so they have more staff, they have better machines,” said Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. “And places with lower incomes and a weaker tax base just don’t have the funds to replace the equipment and hire the staff they might like…So voters end up getting served differentially, you know, depending on where they live.”
According to a new report from the Brennan Center for Justice, Black and Latino voters had to wait the longest to vote and had fewer machines to vote on. The study, which looks at voter access in Maryland, South Carolina and Florida, found that too few poll workers and electronic voting machines contributed to long lines and delays. For example, in South Carolina, there were almost twice as many voters per voting machine or poll worker in some counties than allowed by state law.
Lines are longest when waiting for electronic voting machines in part because only one voter can use them at a time and it takes everyone a few moments to figure out how they work, said voting rights activist Rebecca Wilson.
“Besides the fact that a lot of states are left in the lurch with equipment that’s breaking down, that’s unreliable — [Maryland] had to pull machines out of circulation in the middle of an election because the test screen goes out of calibration,” Wilson said. That means the screen would register a voter’s touch about an inch below the candidate he or she selected, potentially casting a vote for the wrong candidate. “And there’s no telling what’s getting reported,” she said.
Barbara Simons, former IBM programmer and voting technology expert, added that voters are then left with machines with faulty software that are prone to crashes, and are otherwise “physically falling apart” because they are so old, contributing to long lines.
During the 2012 presidential election, Florida also suffered from long wait times — up to six hours in some polling places — that disproportionately affected the state’s large Latino population. But the state and its voting practices have been swirling in controversy before.
Fourteen years ago, it took an entire month for Americans to find out who they had elected to succeed then-President Bill Clinton (D-AR). The ballots in Florida had to be recounted during the 2000 presidential election largely due to failed voting technology that caused votes to not get counted, or incorrect votes.
One of the main culprits was the punch card machine, which registered votes by poking a hole through the paper ballot. But the machines failed to make a clean hole, and votes weren’t registered by ballot readers. The butterfly ballot also complicated the 2000 election, causing voters to pick the wrong candidate because of its overwhelming two-page design.
That election controversially put George W. Bush into the presidency, who lost the popular vote to former Vice President Al Gore. And Florida’s votes were key, not only because it was a swing state, but because the unreliable voting technology it used.
“The 2000 [presidential] election in Florida spotlighted all kinds of problems with voting technology: The design of ballots, the way ballots are counted, the problems with things like punch card ballots, which got all of the attention then,” Burden said.
As a result, President Bush enacted a wave a reforms including the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which required states to upgrade their voting equipment from the punch cards and lever machines that plagued the 2000 election. States then “went on a spending spree” with millions of federal dollars, buying state-of-the-art touch screen voting machines, also known as DREs (direct-recording electronic voting machines), Burden said. States also bought optical scan machines, where voters mark their paper ballot choices by filling out a bubble or connecting arrows. The results are read by a machine, similar to how SAT tests are processed.
“But that was ten years ago, over ten years ago,” Burden said. “And I think anybody who has a personal computer knows that after 10 years it’s time to move on.”
There’s nothing to move on to. Most states are in the midst of a budget crises and can’t afford to upgrade machines, points out Wendy Underhill, director of the National Conference of State Legislatures in Denver.
“It’s difficult to replace them. The main issue is money. They bought them with federal money, and that money is not coming back. In some cases the states pay for but it’s usually the county that pays for it,” Underhill said. “They have to go to their accounting commissioners and argue that it’s a priority but it’s sometimes hard to make the case when you’re up against school needs and [buildings damaged by] fires, etc.”
Voters will certainly have some kind of equipment to cast their votes come Election Day in November, Underhill assured. But while the aging equipment will be ready to use, voters may simply decide it’s not worth the wait. During the last federal election, in 2012, about 201,000 Floridians decided not to vote because of the long lines, according to an Orlando Sentinel analysis.
Even without budget constraints, states looking to replace the crumbling machines can’t. “Unfortunately a lot of the vendors for those machines have gone out of business,” Burden said. Now, there are only a few big vendors, “and many of them are not servicing or offering the type of equipment that states currently have,” because they want states to spend millions to buy the newer models, he said.
So the aging machines get pulled out for Election Day and, if they break down or become untrustworthy, poll workers will shove them back in storage. States make do with what they have, pulling old equipment such as the questionable lever voting machines. “They know how to refurbish equipment, bring it in from other locations, cannibalize equipment,” Underhill said.
There’s also an outstanding question as to whether electronic machines are trustworthy in the first place. Voting technology experts aren’t keen on letting voters use systems that have even the slightest possibility of being compromised. To ensure people are able to exercise their voting rights, Simons said, there must be a way to check over each entry because the electronic machines can have bugs or bad lines of code just like a personal laptop.
All major tech companies, such as Apple, frequently send out bug fixes, most of which are security patches. “So the idea that someone is going to produce a voting machine that won’t have software bugs, that won’t be able to be hacked — there’s no way,” Simons said.
[major, major snippage]
...................................................................................................................................................................
Saturday, September 27, 2014
Who will the GOP choose for their next pincushion?
..................................................................................................
Typical Republican call and response
...................................................................................................................................................................
Congressman Denies Making Controversial Comments About Gays, Forgets The Entire Thing Is On Tape
By Alice Ollstein, September 26, 2014
Rep. Robert Pittenger (R-NC) is now claiming that he did not make comments supporting anti-LGBT employment discrimination, as reported by ThinkProgress earlier this month.
At a town hall event in Ballantyne, North Carolina, ThinkProgress asked Pittenger: “Do you think businesses should be able to fire someone because they are gay or lesbian?” He replied that businesses should have the “autonomy” to fire workers for being LGBT, and asked rhetorically: “Why should government be there to impose on the freedoms we enjoy?”
The Charlotte Observer picked up the story, and reported that when they called Pittenger to confirm the quotes, the congressman “stood by his comments.”
But after local and national human rights groups began organizing around the comments and protesting at Pittenger’s office in Charlotte, he stood by them no longer.
Local channel WSOC-TV reported: “The congressman’s office insists he never made the divisive statement…Pittinger told [ThinkProgress] he does not support the employment non-discrimination act and the blogger ran with it.”
The office repeated the denial to MSNBC: “His opposition to ENDA was ‘translated’ into ‘firing gays’ by that blogger,” the director, Jamie Bowers, wrote in an email to msnbc on Friday.”
Below is the unedited recording of the remarks, which confirms the quotes originally ran by ThinkProgress.
Pittenger begins by saying, “I believe people are already protected.”
This is false. There are no national protections for LGBT workers, and Congress is unlikely to pass them any time soon. While some states have passed protections, North Carolina is not one of them.
He then says: “We don’t want to micromanage people’s lives and businesses. If you have a business, do you want the government to come in and tell you you need to hire somebody?”
Despite this characterization, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act would not involve the government forcing businesses to hire LGBT workers. Rather, it would bar employers from using sexual orientation or gender identity as a reason to fire, refuse to hire or refuse to promote a worker.
In the remarks he now denies, Pittenger compares the right to discriminate in hiring to the right to smoke on private property: “It’s like smoking bans,” he told ThinkProgress “Do you ban smoking or do people have the right to private property? I think people have the right to private property.”
...................................................................................................................................................................
Congressman Denies Making Controversial Comments About Gays, Forgets The Entire Thing Is On Tape
By Alice Ollstein, September 26, 2014
Rep. Robert Pittenger (R-NC) is now claiming that he did not make comments supporting anti-LGBT employment discrimination, as reported by ThinkProgress earlier this month.
At a town hall event in Ballantyne, North Carolina, ThinkProgress asked Pittenger: “Do you think businesses should be able to fire someone because they are gay or lesbian?” He replied that businesses should have the “autonomy” to fire workers for being LGBT, and asked rhetorically: “Why should government be there to impose on the freedoms we enjoy?”
The Charlotte Observer picked up the story, and reported that when they called Pittenger to confirm the quotes, the congressman “stood by his comments.”
But after local and national human rights groups began organizing around the comments and protesting at Pittenger’s office in Charlotte, he stood by them no longer.
Local channel WSOC-TV reported: “The congressman’s office insists he never made the divisive statement…Pittinger told [ThinkProgress] he does not support the employment non-discrimination act and the blogger ran with it.”
The office repeated the denial to MSNBC: “His opposition to ENDA was ‘translated’ into ‘firing gays’ by that blogger,” the director, Jamie Bowers, wrote in an email to msnbc on Friday.”
Below is the unedited recording of the remarks, which confirms the quotes originally ran by ThinkProgress.
Pittenger begins by saying, “I believe people are already protected.”
This is false. There are no national protections for LGBT workers, and Congress is unlikely to pass them any time soon. While some states have passed protections, North Carolina is not one of them.
He then says: “We don’t want to micromanage people’s lives and businesses. If you have a business, do you want the government to come in and tell you you need to hire somebody?”
Despite this characterization, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act would not involve the government forcing businesses to hire LGBT workers. Rather, it would bar employers from using sexual orientation or gender identity as a reason to fire, refuse to hire or refuse to promote a worker.
In the remarks he now denies, Pittenger compares the right to discriminate in hiring to the right to smoke on private property: “It’s like smoking bans,” he told ThinkProgress “Do you ban smoking or do people have the right to private property? I think people have the right to private property.”
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How can an American majority be persecuted? Isn't it the other way around?
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COMMENT: Which 'religious liberties' have these people lost? Has anyone prevented them from attending their church or praying during city council meetings? That [sic] seem to want Christian religious liberties but not the same consideration for other religions.
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Republicans rallying behind religious liberty
By Steve Peoples and Ken Thomas, September 26, 2014
Fighting to improve their brand, leading Republicans rallied behind religious liberty at a Friday gathering of evangelical conservatives, rebuking an unpopular President Barack Obama while skirting divisive social issues.
Speakers did not ignore abortion and gay marriage altogether on the opening day of the annual Values Voter Summit, but a slate of prospective presidential candidates focused on the persecution of Christians and their values at home and abroad — a message GOP officials hope will help unify a divided party and appeal to new voters ahead of November's midterm elections and the 2016 presidential contest.
"Oh, the vacuum of American leadership we see in the world," Texas Sen. Ted Cruz declared Friday in a Washington hotel ballroom packed with religious conservatives. "We need a president who will speak out for people of faith, prisoners of conscience."
Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul echoed the theme in a speech describing America as a nation in "spiritual crisis."
"Not a penny should go to any nation that persecutes or kills Christians," said Paul, who like Cruz is openly considering a 2016 presidential bid.
The speaking program included such potential 2016 candidates as former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal. Several possible Republican candidates — New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush among them — did not attend. The group has positions on social issues across the spectrum — from the libertarian-leaning Paul, who favors less emphasis on abortion and gay marriage, to Huckabee, a former Southern Baptist pastor whose conservative social values define his brand.
The event host, Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, said "a fundamental shift" is underway toward religious freedom among Republicans of all stripes.
"Without religious freedom, we lose the ability to even address those other issues," Perkins said of social issues.
Despite any rhetorical shift, he warned that evangelical voters will not forget priorities such as abortion and traditional marriage on Election Day: "It is not time to rethink our principles or shrink back from the conflict."
The intraparty debate over social issues has broad implications for the GOP's struggle to improve its image following a disappointing 2012 election season. The party platform formally opposes same-sex marriage and abortion rights, but the Republican National Committee released an internal audit last year calling for candidates to be more "inclusive and welcoming" on social issues.
"If we are not, we will limit our ability to attract young people and others, including many women, who agree with us on some but not all issues," the report reads.
The rise of the Islamic State group and intensifying violence across the world has helped re-focus some cultural conservatives. The weekend summit features a dinner reception Saturday to honor Meriam Ibrahim, the Sudanese woman initially sentenced to death for refusing to denounce her Christian faith. After the court reversed its ruling, Ibrahim moved to New Hampshire this summer and figures to be a powerful symbol for Republicans campaigning in the state's first-in-the-nation presidential primary.
Jindal, who is also weighing a White House bid, seized on what he called Obama's "silent war" on religious freedom.
"The United States of America did not create religious liberty," Jindal said. "Religious liberty created the United States of America."
Chip Saltsman, who served as Huckabee's presidential campaign manager in 2008, said concerns over religious persecution are centered on the same principles that have guided evangelical conservatives for years.
"When you look at what's going on in the world today, you talk about freedom issues and life issues; they're all the same," Saltsman said. "To be corny, those are all life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness issues."
Abortion and gay marriage were not forgotten on Friday, however.
"Let this generation be the one to stop abortion in America," Indiana Rep. Marlin Stutzman declared, calling on evangelicals to be "happy warriors" in the debate.
Cruz, an evangelical favorite who overwhelmingly won last year's Values Voter presidential straw poll, drew applause for chastising those in the GOP who encourage Republican candidates to downplay "family values."
"How do we win? We defend the values that are American values," Cruz said. "We stand for life. We stand for marriage. We stand for Israel."
Even Paul weighed in on abortion: "Don't tell me that 5- and 6-pound babies have no rights simply because they're not yet born," the Kentucky senator said and later added, "What America needs is a revival."
...................................................................................................................................................................
COMMENT: Which 'religious liberties' have these people lost? Has anyone prevented them from attending their church or praying during city council meetings? That [sic] seem to want Christian religious liberties but not the same consideration for other religions.
...................................................................................................................................................................
Republicans rallying behind religious liberty
By Steve Peoples and Ken Thomas, September 26, 2014
Fighting to improve their brand, leading Republicans rallied behind religious liberty at a Friday gathering of evangelical conservatives, rebuking an unpopular President Barack Obama while skirting divisive social issues.
Speakers did not ignore abortion and gay marriage altogether on the opening day of the annual Values Voter Summit, but a slate of prospective presidential candidates focused on the persecution of Christians and their values at home and abroad — a message GOP officials hope will help unify a divided party and appeal to new voters ahead of November's midterm elections and the 2016 presidential contest.
"Oh, the vacuum of American leadership we see in the world," Texas Sen. Ted Cruz declared Friday in a Washington hotel ballroom packed with religious conservatives. "We need a president who will speak out for people of faith, prisoners of conscience."
Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul echoed the theme in a speech describing America as a nation in "spiritual crisis."
"Not a penny should go to any nation that persecutes or kills Christians," said Paul, who like Cruz is openly considering a 2016 presidential bid.
The speaking program included such potential 2016 candidates as former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal. Several possible Republican candidates — New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush among them — did not attend. The group has positions on social issues across the spectrum — from the libertarian-leaning Paul, who favors less emphasis on abortion and gay marriage, to Huckabee, a former Southern Baptist pastor whose conservative social values define his brand.
The event host, Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, said "a fundamental shift" is underway toward religious freedom among Republicans of all stripes.
"Without religious freedom, we lose the ability to even address those other issues," Perkins said of social issues.
Despite any rhetorical shift, he warned that evangelical voters will not forget priorities such as abortion and traditional marriage on Election Day: "It is not time to rethink our principles or shrink back from the conflict."
The intraparty debate over social issues has broad implications for the GOP's struggle to improve its image following a disappointing 2012 election season. The party platform formally opposes same-sex marriage and abortion rights, but the Republican National Committee released an internal audit last year calling for candidates to be more "inclusive and welcoming" on social issues.
"If we are not, we will limit our ability to attract young people and others, including many women, who agree with us on some but not all issues," the report reads.
The rise of the Islamic State group and intensifying violence across the world has helped re-focus some cultural conservatives. The weekend summit features a dinner reception Saturday to honor Meriam Ibrahim, the Sudanese woman initially sentenced to death for refusing to denounce her Christian faith. After the court reversed its ruling, Ibrahim moved to New Hampshire this summer and figures to be a powerful symbol for Republicans campaigning in the state's first-in-the-nation presidential primary.
Jindal, who is also weighing a White House bid, seized on what he called Obama's "silent war" on religious freedom.
"The United States of America did not create religious liberty," Jindal said. "Religious liberty created the United States of America."
Chip Saltsman, who served as Huckabee's presidential campaign manager in 2008, said concerns over religious persecution are centered on the same principles that have guided evangelical conservatives for years.
"When you look at what's going on in the world today, you talk about freedom issues and life issues; they're all the same," Saltsman said. "To be corny, those are all life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness issues."
Abortion and gay marriage were not forgotten on Friday, however.
"Let this generation be the one to stop abortion in America," Indiana Rep. Marlin Stutzman declared, calling on evangelicals to be "happy warriors" in the debate.
Cruz, an evangelical favorite who overwhelmingly won last year's Values Voter presidential straw poll, drew applause for chastising those in the GOP who encourage Republican candidates to downplay "family values."
"How do we win? We defend the values that are American values," Cruz said. "We stand for life. We stand for marriage. We stand for Israel."
Even Paul weighed in on abortion: "Don't tell me that 5- and 6-pound babies have no rights simply because they're not yet born," the Kentucky senator said and later added, "What America needs is a revival."
...................................................................................................................................................................
Friday, September 26, 2014
"Is spreading misinformation really all that different from terrorism?"
...................................................................................................................................................................
Do you know someone who sends e-mail forwards that nearly always turn out to be false or mostly false? Even though this is older (2011), here's a good "lesson" about those forwards that you can share.
...................................................................................................................................................................
Media literacy lesson of the day: Debunking email forwards
By Ben Colmery, October 8, 2011
I recently received an email from someone I know who is a howitzer of email forwards that often reveal themselves to be false or only partly true with just a few minutes of research. In this post, you will see my response, which hopefully offers some media literacy insight into how to distinguish fact from fiction in email forwards.
The response is to an email about Israeli agent Juval Aviv (text of email here) and his supposed warnings about the grave danger America is in re: terrorists.
The recipient’s name has been excluded to protect his reputation (though he’s done his share of damage to it on his own with the constant barrage of email hoaxes over the years).
Viewer discretion is advised.
[Author's note: I've inserted headings for instructional value that weren't in the original email].
Dear _________,
This link argues that the email you have forwarded me is false. http://www.snopes.com/rumors/soapbox/juvalaviv.asp
Do you fact check your forwards before you forward them, or do you just assume they must be fact?
I googled “Advice from an Israeli Agent Juval Aviv snopes” (click the link for guidance) and the link above was the first link that came up.
The second link was http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/errata/a/juval_aviv.htm
Then, many of the next several links are from bloggers who are very certain this must be fact, without question, and some links of people who have posted it in comments on other people’s sites. It’s enough of an echo chamber to make the email forward almost seem like fact.
Now, I wouldn’t immediately blow this off simply because two sites show it to be a false story. But the thing is, what you forwarded to me predicted something coming in the next few months. Yet, Snopes published it in 2009. So, I can only conclude that your email forward is not accurate, as it is now 2011.
If you don’t fact check your forwards, can we really trust your beliefs?
It makes me wonder about your process for determining fact from falsehood, as this happens a fair amount with your forwards. It also makes it hard to trust what you send, and in my opinion, it weakens your arguments.
This makes it difficult to trust your forwards about the false climate science consensus conspiracy, Obama’s hidden agendas and illegitimacies as president, the dangers of illegal immigrants, the myth of moderate muslims and the impending terrorist threat of muslim extremism, and that race determines intelligence, among other contentions. This is not to say that there isn’t a false climate science consensus conspiracy, that Obama doesn’t have a hidden agenda and isn’t an illegitimate president, and so on. It’s just that I’ve received enough email forwards from you that have been shown to be false or inconclusive to cast a doubt on the rest of your forwards.
False email forwards often have these traits
One thing I have noticed is a lot of your forwards that end up being false exhibit certain traits, such as large font sizes, overuse of italics, multicolored text, and dire warnings about how we must act now or experience certain peril. It doesn’t mean that having these traits automatically renders them false. However, I do find it to be an immediate warning sign that I should check the forward’s facts.
Do you do any research before passing along these forwards that speak of certain peril? If not, I think you should, because doing this is not unlike whispering “fire” in a theater.
Is spreading misinformation really all that different from terrorism?
These messages are clearly all over the internet and filling up countless email inboxes. And with them, they are spreading misinformation, and reinforcing perspectives that encourage fearfulness, divisiveness, and in some cases, violence, which I think is very damaging to our society.
In the end, how is this all that different from terrorism?
And who exactly are these people writing these, and what are their agendas? Why are they so determined to make us all afraid of people who are different from us, and to make rash, ill-informed decisions, as they seem to be?
Hold yourself to the same standard as those you criticize
You have criticized “the media” as biased for misrepresenting truth and leaving out facts (I’ve received my share of “this is what the liberal media won’t tell you” emails from you). And yet, it feels at times that you don’t hold yourself to the same standard to which you feel these media should hold themselves.
I am not saying you shouldn’t forward emails that challenge prevailing viewpoints, question authorities or the motives of people you consider a threat, or shed light on real dangers of which people might not be aware. Please, continue to forward me emails that challenge my facts and my assumptions. I greatly appreciate them, and enjoy the challenge.
Please, check the facts before you hit “forward”
I’m just asking that you please, also, rigorously research the facts of the forward first, and consider viewpoints that challenge the assumptions of these forwards before you hit “forward.” And please, encourage the people in your network that forward these emails to do the same.
...................................................................................................................................................................
Do you know someone who sends e-mail forwards that nearly always turn out to be false or mostly false? Even though this is older (2011), here's a good "lesson" about those forwards that you can share.
...................................................................................................................................................................
Media literacy lesson of the day: Debunking email forwards
By Ben Colmery, October 8, 2011
I recently received an email from someone I know who is a howitzer of email forwards that often reveal themselves to be false or only partly true with just a few minutes of research. In this post, you will see my response, which hopefully offers some media literacy insight into how to distinguish fact from fiction in email forwards.
The response is to an email about Israeli agent Juval Aviv (text of email here) and his supposed warnings about the grave danger America is in re: terrorists.
The recipient’s name has been excluded to protect his reputation (though he’s done his share of damage to it on his own with the constant barrage of email hoaxes over the years).
Viewer discretion is advised.
[Author's note: I've inserted headings for instructional value that weren't in the original email].
Dear _________,
This link argues that the email you have forwarded me is false. http://www.snopes.com/rumors/soapbox/juvalaviv.asp
Do you fact check your forwards before you forward them, or do you just assume they must be fact?
I googled “Advice from an Israeli Agent Juval Aviv snopes” (click the link for guidance) and the link above was the first link that came up.
The second link was http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/errata/a/juval_aviv.htm
Then, many of the next several links are from bloggers who are very certain this must be fact, without question, and some links of people who have posted it in comments on other people’s sites. It’s enough of an echo chamber to make the email forward almost seem like fact.
Now, I wouldn’t immediately blow this off simply because two sites show it to be a false story. But the thing is, what you forwarded to me predicted something coming in the next few months. Yet, Snopes published it in 2009. So, I can only conclude that your email forward is not accurate, as it is now 2011.
If you don’t fact check your forwards, can we really trust your beliefs?
It makes me wonder about your process for determining fact from falsehood, as this happens a fair amount with your forwards. It also makes it hard to trust what you send, and in my opinion, it weakens your arguments.
This makes it difficult to trust your forwards about the false climate science consensus conspiracy, Obama’s hidden agendas and illegitimacies as president, the dangers of illegal immigrants, the myth of moderate muslims and the impending terrorist threat of muslim extremism, and that race determines intelligence, among other contentions. This is not to say that there isn’t a false climate science consensus conspiracy, that Obama doesn’t have a hidden agenda and isn’t an illegitimate president, and so on. It’s just that I’ve received enough email forwards from you that have been shown to be false or inconclusive to cast a doubt on the rest of your forwards.
False email forwards often have these traits
One thing I have noticed is a lot of your forwards that end up being false exhibit certain traits, such as large font sizes, overuse of italics, multicolored text, and dire warnings about how we must act now or experience certain peril. It doesn’t mean that having these traits automatically renders them false. However, I do find it to be an immediate warning sign that I should check the forward’s facts.
Do you do any research before passing along these forwards that speak of certain peril? If not, I think you should, because doing this is not unlike whispering “fire” in a theater.
Is spreading misinformation really all that different from terrorism?
These messages are clearly all over the internet and filling up countless email inboxes. And with them, they are spreading misinformation, and reinforcing perspectives that encourage fearfulness, divisiveness, and in some cases, violence, which I think is very damaging to our society.
In the end, how is this all that different from terrorism?
And who exactly are these people writing these, and what are their agendas? Why are they so determined to make us all afraid of people who are different from us, and to make rash, ill-informed decisions, as they seem to be?
Hold yourself to the same standard as those you criticize
You have criticized “the media” as biased for misrepresenting truth and leaving out facts (I’ve received my share of “this is what the liberal media won’t tell you” emails from you). And yet, it feels at times that you don’t hold yourself to the same standard to which you feel these media should hold themselves.
I am not saying you shouldn’t forward emails that challenge prevailing viewpoints, question authorities or the motives of people you consider a threat, or shed light on real dangers of which people might not be aware. Please, continue to forward me emails that challenge my facts and my assumptions. I greatly appreciate them, and enjoy the challenge.
Please, check the facts before you hit “forward”
I’m just asking that you please, also, rigorously research the facts of the forward first, and consider viewpoints that challenge the assumptions of these forwards before you hit “forward.” And please, encourage the people in your network that forward these emails to do the same.
...................................................................................................................................................................
"Mortensen said it’s important to consume media in a way that doesn’t constantly reinforce your own point of view ..."
...................................................................................................................................................................
COMMENT: I’ve always considered Fox News a fictional drama with scripted actors playing the parts of journalist.
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Viggo Mortensen: Fox News ‘So Appallingly Shallow and Manipulative’
By Josh Feldman, September 17, 2014
Viggo Mortensen, the actor best known for his role as Aragorn, Son of Arathorn, stopped by HuffPost Live yesterday and shared some of his news consumption habits. Specifically, his fascination with how “appallingly shallow and manipulative” Fox News is capable of being.
Mortensen said it’s important to consume media in a way that doesn’t constantly reinforce your own point of view, and that’s why he checks out conservative media outlets every so often. He explained, “I do listen to Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and Mike Savage, and I do watch Fox News once in a while. I can only take small doses of it because they’re so appallingly shallow and manipulative.”
He noted that liberal media outlets have their faults with the occasional omission, but he believe there’s “more of an effort to deal with facts” and it’s “certainly not as brazen a form of lying that you get from Fox.”
Watch the clip here, via HuffPost Live.
...................................................................................................................................................................
COMMENT: I’ve always considered Fox News a fictional drama with scripted actors playing the parts of journalist.
...................................................................................................................................................................
Viggo Mortensen: Fox News ‘So Appallingly Shallow and Manipulative’
By Josh Feldman, September 17, 2014
Viggo Mortensen, the actor best known for his role as Aragorn, Son of Arathorn, stopped by HuffPost Live yesterday and shared some of his news consumption habits. Specifically, his fascination with how “appallingly shallow and manipulative” Fox News is capable of being.
Mortensen said it’s important to consume media in a way that doesn’t constantly reinforce your own point of view, and that’s why he checks out conservative media outlets every so often. He explained, “I do listen to Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and Mike Savage, and I do watch Fox News once in a while. I can only take small doses of it because they’re so appallingly shallow and manipulative.”
He noted that liberal media outlets have their faults with the occasional omission, but he believe there’s “more of an effort to deal with facts” and it’s “certainly not as brazen a form of lying that you get from Fox.”
Watch the clip here, via HuffPost Live.
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