apple juice

I forgot to post this editorial up on Thanksgiving, but as usual Thomas Friedman wrote an excellent opinion piece for the NYTimes:

Yes, I want to get almost the entire Republican side of the House of Representatives to bend its ethics rules just for me. I want to be able to twist the arms of House Republicans to repeal a rule that automatically requires party leaders to step down if they are indicted on a felony charge – something a Texas prosecutor is considering doing to DeLay because of corruption allegations.

My favorite, since I love the H2:

If I can’t be The Man, then I at least want to be the owner of a Hummer – with American flag decals all over the back bumper, because Hummer owners are, on average, a little more patriotic than you and me.

Yes, I want to drive the mother of all gas-guzzlers that gets so little mileage you have to drive from gas station to gas station. Yes, I want to drive my Hummer and never have to think that by consuming so much oil, I am making transfer payments to the worst Arab regimes that transfer money to Islamic charities that transfer money to madrassas that teach children intolerance, antipluralism and how to hate the infidels.

(I’m no good at writing these reviews, but here goes…)

I just got back from The Arcade Fire, live at the 400 Bar in Minneapolis, and I thought I would share a few thoughts.

It was an awesome show, living up to the hype that I had heard: The live show was even better than their album.

7 band members took the stage and played with the confidence and energy of a band that knows exactly what they are going to bring, and how to push it further.

If you have the opportunity to see them, I highly recommend it. Look for band members drumming on the walls, the speakers and each other’s heads. Look for the inflatable cow being tossed around. Look for the dancing violin player. Look for all kinds of wacky stuff that happens during the show, and what you’ll see is a band that has a very bright future in front of them, and I look forward to seeing it develop.

Very interesting article in the Economist that I found today, entitled The Fear Myth

The author’s premise is that the Republicans didn’t beat the Democrats because of fear, but because they sold hope better.

But if they are going to extract any useful lessons from their humiliation, the Democrats need to realise that the Republicans didn’t just beat them on fear. They clobbered them on hope.

I don’t think that the author gives enough credit to the power of fear. I think that it is a very powerful motivator, and I would argue that fear is a bigger motivator than hope. But I do agree with him that the Democrats didn’t spend enough time on hope.

There was no way to compete with Cheney’s “You’re all gonna die” speeches, but there was no effort to channel the soaring optimism of Obama’s convention speech:

Tonight, we gather to affirm the greatness of our nation, not because of the height of our skyscrapers, or the power of our military, or the size of our economy. Our pride is based on a very simple premise, summed up in a declaration made over two hundred years ago, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. That among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

That is the true genius of America, a faith in the simple dreams of its people, the insistence on small miracles.

and…

In the end, that is God’s greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation; the belief in things not seen; the belief that there are better days ahead. I believe we can give our middle class relief and provide working families with a road to opportunity. I believe we can provide jobs to the jobless, homes to the homeless, and reclaim young people in cities across America from violence and despair. I believe that as we stand on the crossroads of history, we can make the right choices, and meet the challenges that face us. America!

Obviously, Obama wasn’t running. From the Economist article:

Arguably the only optimistic thing about the Kerry campaign was its slogan: ‚ÄúHelp is on the way‚Äù. In general, the Democrats focused on America’s intractable problems. By contrast, Mr Bush not only sounded upbeat, but also came up with solutions, of sorts.

So read the article, it’s quite good. Not that I agree with the whole thing. But there are things to ponder…

Howard Dean spoke tuesday about the role of the media and politics in this country (Yale Daily News). As he is for so many different issues, I think he is absolutely right on with his comments.

The television networks, especially Fox News, are most to blame for the increased focus in journalism on flash and entertainment, Dean said. Dean said these networks aim to entertain because “entertainment sells better than news.” The infamous “scream speech,” often blamed for Dean’s loss to Sen. John Kerry ’66 in the Democratic primaries, was partially a media fabrication because it was appealing for its entertainment value rather than its newsworthiness, Dean said.

If you’ve seen the camcorder version of the speech, you will know exactly what I’m talking about. Of course, I have it on my laptop, if anyone would like to see it…

You may have heard that a number of ABC stations decided not to show ‘Saving Private Ryan’ on Veterans’ Day this year. Frank Rich of the NYT has written an excellent article dealing with these issues of censorship, the Iraq war, sanitizing the world for the Americans who can’t handle the truth. (You can’t handle the truth!)

What makes the “Ryan” case both chilling and a harbinger of what’s to come is that it isn’t about Janet Jackson and sex but about the presentation of war at a time when we are fighting one. That some of the companies whose stations refused to broadcast “Saving Private Ryan” also own major American newspapers in cities as various as Providence and Atlanta leaves you wondering what other kind of self-censorship will be practiced next. If these media outlets are afraid to show a graphic Hollywood treatment of a 60-year-old war starring the beloved Tom Hanks because the feds might fine them, toy with their licenses or deny them permission to expand their empires, might they defensively soften their news divisions’ efforts to present the graphic truth of an ongoing war? The pressure groups that are exercised by Bono and “Saving Private Ryan” are often the same ones who are campaigning to derail any news organization that’s not towing the administration line in lockstep with Fox.

Even without being threatened, American news media at first sanitized the current war, whether through carelessness or jingoism, proving too credulous about everything from weapons of mass destruction to “Saving Private Lynch” to “Mission Accomplished.” During the early weeks of the invasion, carnage of any kind was kept off TV screens, as if war could be cost-free. Once the press did get its act together and exercised skepticism, it came under siege. News organizations that report facts challenging the administration’s version of events risk being called traitors. As with “Saving Private Ryan,” the aim of the news censors is to bleach out any ugliness or violence. But because the war in Iraq, unlike World War II, is increasingly unpopular and doesn’t have an assured triumphant ending, it must also be scrubbed of any bad news that might undermine its support among the administration’s base. Thus the censors argue that Abu Ghraib, and now a marine’s shooting of a wounded Iraqi prisoner in a Falluja mosque, are vastly “overplayed” by the so-called elite media.

I think it’s become very clear in the last year that there is fundamental disconnect about what people in this country “believe” is happening in the world around us. It is this disconnect of “faith-based” vs. “reality-based” that has created a climate where people will vote for a president who, in my opinion, has recklessly gotten us into a war, and then they don’t want to see the results of it.

Or don’t want to be reminded of the results of past wars. I’m pretty sure Saving Private Ryan was universally praised for it’s accurate depiction of War. Well, we’ve got one going on right now. It’s always your right to tune out, but let’s not block people who want the truth from actually getting the truth.

Fallujah In Pictures

Okay,

Something we’ve all been hearing about is the broad victory by president bush! A clear mandate! Most votes ever!

Hogwash! I say.

Okay, the last one is true, he did get the most votes ever in a presidential election.

Do you know who got the second most votes in american history? John Kerry.

It was the closest win for an incumbent president since woodrow wilson.

So when you hear people talking about this as if there was a massive landslide victory, be sure to get up and deliver a verbal smackdown to the tune of: “51% is hardly a mandate!”

Nearly half of us don’t agree with:

• Lying to the American people about the reasons for going to Iraq.
• Destroying the environment in the name of oil and gas exploration.
• Recklessly cutting taxes while we are in the depths of an enormous debt.

I could go on, there are many more reasons, but it is clear that many people don’t care about these things, and don’t care what I have to say about it.

But, thanks for passing the buck to my unborn children! That’ll be really fun for them.

Conventional Wisdom immediately following the election was that the youth turnout this year ws nothing to write home about. It was expected that there would be an extremely large youth turnout, but initially, the media was finding no evidence of it.

Luckily, some actual data has come out and it appears that the youth did in fact show up in much greater numbers than in 2000, and in fact it was the largest youth turnout since 1972, the first year that 18-21 year olds could vote.

The main reason for the initial underwhelming exit polls was that since there was a larger turnout in general, the 18-29 year old demographic didn’t increase it’s share of the total.

Crowded Polls Dilute Youth Turnout

CIRCLE researchers based their calculations on exit polls done for The Associated Press and others by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International, and found that 18- to 29-year-old turnout was up by 4.6 million voters and more than nine percentage points from exit poll data from the 2000 election.

The figures also beat exit poll numbers from 1992, the last time the youth vote spiked amid an otherwise general decline in turnout since 18-year-olds first got the chance to vote in 1972.

Turnout increased among other age groups, too, leaving young voters with roughly the same proportion of the total electorate nationally as in 2000. But activists who were part of an unprecedented effort to get out the vote — from Rock the Vote and Declare Yourself to the Youth Vote Coalition — felt that didn’t detract from their accomplishment.

Take heart my peers and young friends, the foundation is there…