The priorities he would set for the country, from leading the world in renewable energy to retooling education and immigration policies to help American high-tech industries, are far-sighted.

He has stood up far more forcefully than Romney against those in his party who reject evolution and the science behind global warming.

This was a real shot across the bow of the ship under whose flag Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum are sailing, that ship that has abandoned any rational discourse about the nature of government and the well-being of the electorate in favor of hell-and-brimstone apocalyptic language.

I can remember when New Hampshire was the ultimate boogeyman of conservatism, back when the Manchester Union Leader could reduce even the most outspoken liberal candidate to tears. New Hampshire, as a state, has changed a lot since then. Hell, it has successfully legalized gay marriage at a time when the California effort to do so is still mired in the courts. The New Hampshire college students whom Santorum addressed yesterday decided to call him out on his opposition to gay marriage and booed him when he left the room.

What this all means, however, is that New Hampshire is more interested in talking about governance than in listening to fundamentalist sermons. As a result even the conservative voters may well take the Globe endorsement seriously. Unfortunately, New Hampshire is no more representative of national thinking than Massachusetts is. The Globe endorsement may win a small battle for Huntsman; but my guess is that, for just about any other electoral decision, they have given him the kiss of death.

Posted by Stephen Smoliar

Net News Publisher for World News

Of course Gingrich is not interested in accuracy or logical consistency. His only priority is to build up a base of voters; and, as a pioneer of postmodern politics, he knows that one wins arguments in the eyes of those voters through rhetoric, rather than logic. As I follow his words and his actions, I am reminded of the state of affairs about a year ago when Glenn Beck seemed to be the darling of conservative Republic thinking. When he gave his Restoring Honor rally in Washington, I summarized my thoughts as follows:

The bottom line is that, whether it is a matter of fact-checking or the sort of semantic analysis that I have exercised here, Beck’s claims are in sore need of valid warrants. Beck’s rhetoric is neither more nor less than the 21st-century incarnation of the Big Lie, which Wikipedia describes as “a propaganda technique which entered mass consciousness with Adolf Hitler‘s 1925 autobiography Mein Kampf.” In the simplest of terms, the principle is that people will believe anything, if you say it loud enough and long enough; and Beck has certainly demonstrated that he can be very good when it comes to being both loud in volume and long in duration.

This is not the first time a conservative Republican has tried to win votes through demagoguery. After all, Sarah Palin was one of the speakers invited to Beck’s rally. The real question is whether or not we have enough voters who, even though they may know demagoguery when they see it, have decided that they want it. After all, last night Mitt Romney took a very confrontational stance in calling out Gingrich’s distortions; but will it win Romney any percentage points in the polls? Enquiring minds want to know!

Posted by Stephen Smoliar

Net News Publisher for World News

In his first three days as a presidential contender, he has already antagonised Democrats by implying that the US military does not respect Mr Obama as commander-in-chief.

On a campaign stop in the US state of Iowa on Tuesday, Mr Perry said: “If this guy [Ben Bernanke] prints more money between now and the election, I don’t know what y’all will do to him in Iowa, but we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas.

“Printing more money to play politics at this particular time in American history is almost treacherous, treasonous in my opinion.”

This is pretty scary stuff. Does Barack Obama really think that such challenges can be met by appealing to reason? Perry knows the power of irrational emotion, and he is going to apply that knowledge for all it is worth. Will Obama be able to come up with the right way to confront this viciousness, or will he let the mad dog run wild under the assumption that it will eventually tire itself into slumber?

Posted by Stephen Smoliar

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Several readers have informed me that they would like to see a Palin/Bachmann ticket in 2012, and this article is an attempt to take an informal survey, to access how popular such a sentiment is.

O’Neill’s posted biographical statement (at the bottom of his article) is, to say the least, interesting:

Born in June of 1951 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Jim O’Neill proudly served in the U.S. Navy from 1970-1974 in both UDT-21 (Underwater Demolition Team) and SEAL Team Two. A member of MENSA, he worked as a commercial diver in the waters off Scotland, India, and the United States. In 1998 while attending the University of South Florida as a journalism student, O’Neill won “First Place” in the “Carol Burnett/University of Hawaii AEJMC Research in Journalism Ethics Award. The annual contest was set up by Carol Burnett with the money she won from successfully suing the National Enquirer for libel.

The article appeared on the Canada Free Press Web site, whose connection with Canada seems to be as questionable as its slogan:

…Because without America there is no Free World

Whether or not this is some extreme outlier of opinion or the beginning of a groundswell, O’Neill’s article was picked up by Gary, one of the active participants on Yahoo! Buzz; and, since he installed a pointer to it twelve hours ago, it has received 171 “Buzz up!” votes. Apparently Yahoo! has decided to move beyond its unscientific approach to polling by turning the vox populi concept of democracy into a popularity contest based, probably, on the American Idol model. As they probably still like to say, “The Internet changes everything;” but, in terms of how politics does its thing, the tools may be different but the practices is clearly the same-old-same-old.

Posted by Stephen Smoliar

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Chanting “Kill the bill,” thousands of conservatives incensed over the Democrats’ health care overhaul protested at the Capitol on Thursday, arguing that the legislation amounts to a government takeover of the nation’s medical system.

The crowd, invited on national television by Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., was staunchly anti-government — “Politicians lie, people die,” read one sign — but loudly cheered the House Republicans who hosted the event. The protest attracted many of the so-called Tea Party demonstrators angry with increased spending and an expanded government role under the Obama administration.

Note how this “invitation” was proffered:

On Oct. 30, she invited viewers of Fox News to Washington to roam House office buildings and confront lawmakers.

“I’d love to have every one of your viewers join me so that we can go up and down through the halls,” Bachmann said. “Find members of Congress, look at the whites of their eyes and say, ‘Don’t take away my health care.’”

The Republican leadership seems at bit ambivalent over one of the lesser members of their ranks summoning the latest march on Washington; but House Republican leader John Boehner seems to know a good bandwagon when he sees one. He appeared before Bachmann’s roused rabble to encourage them with this bit of persiflage:

This bill is the greatest threat to freedom that I have seen.

For those who might find my phrase “roused rabble” a bit extreme, Kellman offered some examples of this particular vox populi approach:

The crowd, including many older Americans, carried placards that ranged from pithy — “Free health care isn’t free” — to harsh.

“Ken-ya Trust Obama?” said one, referencing the president’s African roots and claims by some that he wasn’t born in the United States.

One protester carried a sign reading, “Bury Obamacare with Kennedy,” a reference to Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., who died of brain cancer this past summer.

Of course none of this is really about health care. It is all about certain Republicans determined to recover political power by any means necessary, and the means that seem to be most effective are the ones grounded in passionately emotional divisiveness. It is hard to forecast where that divisiveness will lead, regardless of whether or not health care gets the reform it so desperately needs; but I continue to believe that our best model for forecasting may still be the historical data on the rise of the Third Reich. At the very least, this should have what the media used to call (back in the days when they still respected qualities such as civility) a “chilling effect.”

Posted by Stephen Smoliar

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A state budget deal to close a $41 billion shortfall has been put further into question early this morning after Senate Republicans ousted their leader who had helped negotiate the long-awaited plan with other top lawmakers in California.

The unusual action occurred as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Democratic lawmakers tried for a fourth night in a row to persuade at least one more Republican senator to cast the deciding vote on the budget, a move officials said is necessary for the state to avoid insolvency.

Speaking to reporters outside his office, the ousted Minority Leader Dave Cogdill, R-Modesto, said, “It’s a shame it ended like this.”

Cogdill was one of the four legislative leaders who negotiated the emergency budget deal with the governor. Their compromise budget package, reached after three months of negotiations, contained nearly $16 billion in program cuts, $11 billion in borrowing and $14.4 billion in tax increases. The most contentious debate has been over the proposed tax hikes.

Republicans selected Sen. Dennis Hollingsworth, R-Murrieta (Riverside County) as their new Minority leader. Hollingsworth is part of the conservative wing of the Senate Republican caucus and he has been adamantly against raising any taxes.

If ever there were a time to appreciate President John Adams’ aversion to the concept of political parties, this would be it. Even Weber recognized that the definition and management of a political party had nothing to do with the extent to which those in office represented those who elected them. Rather, it had to do with the distribution of power within the party itself and the tendency of a single “boss” to manage that distribution of power:

The boss has no firm political ‘principles’; he is completely unprincipled in attitude and asks merely: What will capture votes?

In a discussion of partisanship on last night’s NewsHour on PBS, one analyst observed that, in the early days of the Clinton Administration, Newt Gingrich was so focused on establishing Republican control of the House of Representatives that he forbade Republican Representatives from continuing their regular tennis games with colleagues from across the aisle. Cross-party socialization has long provided paths to the sharing of power that satisfied all involved parties; but Gingrich was concerned only with redistributing that power. Now we are seeing similar thinking in play in the California Senate, going all the way down to who will serve as minority leader. Ultimately, the real losers in this power game are the people of California, who are discovering that their elected representatives are beholden to forces more powerful than the voters. Rather, they are, as Weber put it (even though he was talking about England), victims of a “dictatorship resting on the exploitation of mass emotionality.” The only thing sadder than the current budgetary impasse in California is that Gingrich has left a legacy in which all of our country’s voters are victims of that same “exploitation of mass emotionality.” President Barack Obama is may trying hard to get our national culture beyond such vulnerability; but it is clear that he has not yet made very much progress, whether in California or in any other part of the country.

Posted by Stephen Smoliar

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The Shame of the Public Schools

I am used to BBC reporters showing up within a stone’s throw of where I live. Between the Circuit Court of Appeals and City Hall itself, there is almost always something happening of interest to the international BBC audience. Nevertheless, I was surprised to see that today’s BBC NEWS Web site has a feature report, which Rajesh Mirchandani filed from Los Angeles, on the utterly pathetic conditions (not to mention future) of public education in the state of California. The bottom line is that, as Mirchandani put it, “with the economic slowdown and falling revenue from sales and property taxes, the state faces a budget deficit that could top $20bn this year.” This puts our illustrious Governor in the sort of crisis situation that none of his movie personae ever had to confront:

In March, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger refused to rule out tax rises and deep cuts in services, including education – anything, he said, that could help make ends meet.

Needless to say, this has administrators, teachers, and parents all worrying about whether California will end up ransoming off its future in order to keep treading water in the present “slough of despond.” As they say, when you are up to your eyeballs in alligators, it is too late to worry about draining the swamp. The alligators are there, they are hungry, and the prevailing opinion is that this is no time to ask how we got into this mess in the first place.

Still, in light of my recent indulgence in a conspiracy theory, I have to wonder whether we got into this place purely out of our stubborn resistance to just about any form of taxation (Wikipedia even has a page for “California Proposition 13 (1978)“) or whether we are here through an act of more “intelligent design.” After all, it is worth remembering that Newt Gingrich’s Contract “on” America involved some rather long-term thinking and planning; and the “side effect” of “The Project for the New American Century” was launched through the momentum of Gingrich’s spade-work. This latter effort could not be sustained for even ten years, but Newt is still a presence. He is now more of a “background presence,” rather than a “foreground presence;” but the guy is so good at planning that this could well be by his latest “cunning plan.”

So what if there is a design to introduce (in the words of my conspiracy theory) “a new class of slaves?” Consider how such a design might benefit from a wholesale undermining of our public education system, not just in California but across the country. On the surface this would seem like bad news for all those wealthy institutions: there would be a shortage of skilled talent available for hire. On the other hand, notwithstanding the latest claptrap from JP Rangaswami on “a genuine war for talent,” from the point of view of the institutions themselves, that bad news might actually be good news! Yes, it would mean that such an institution would have to assume the responsibility of training all new hires in the necessary skills; but it would also mean that we would have a future work force dependent on those institutions for most, if not all, of the education they get. That dependency could ultimately result in a “new economy” of indentured servitude. (I use those scare quotes out of cynicism for the economic thinking that was so seductive as the dot-com bubble inflated; but I see that I have used it more recently in conjunction with my writings about the War Against the Poor.) Yes, if you want their “hearts and minds,” one way is to get them “by the balls;” but controlling their education may be an alternative. Furthermore, it is an alternative that is, on the whole, less painful and is thus less likely to be met with resistance!

When I was working in Singapore in the early Nineties, I had the opportunity to hear a talk by the Dean of the Business School at Carnegie-Mellon University. About the only thing I remember from that talk is what he had to say about their work-study program. I was familiar with this idea, particularly since many of my personal undergraduate friends at MIT had benefited from it. What struck me, however, was that Carnegie-Mellon was taking a new approach, which required an entering freshman to commit to a corporate work-study sponsor before even matriculating. This early commitment was required, because the “work” side of the work-study plan could begin even before the student had completed the basic core requirements. That commitment would then sustain through the entire undergraduate career; and, unless I am mistaken, it also involved a “payback” commitment of serving as an employee for some fixed period of time after graduation. I heard all of this about fifteen years ago; and even then it sounded as if the corporate powers behind work-study at Carnegie-Mellon were basically calling the shots on the sort of academic life a student could lead. If this sort of thing could happen at the undergraduate level, why could it not have a similar impact on how education is handled at the level of what we currently call “public education?” Are we witnessing the disappearance of “public” from “public education?”

Posted by Stephen Smoliar

Net News Publisher for World News

These Republican leaders will expand Mayor Giuliani’s campaign in Georgia and work towards the state’s February 5th primary.

“From his record of cutting taxes in New York City to his vision for keeping the country safe from international threats and ending illegal immigration, Rudy is the candidate who has been tested and is most ready to lead our country,” said Senator Wiles. “Mayor Giuliani is the leader Georgians are looking for in their next President.”

Today’s endorsers join a growing Georgia team, which includes State Superintendent of Schools Kathy Cox, Insurance Commissioner John Oxendine, and the Speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives, Glenn Richardson.

Passantino was described as one of “Georgia’s Most Influential People” in the March 2006 and 2007 issues of James Magazine and will also serve as Honorary Co-Chair of Georgia Lawyers for Rudy.

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