Can I make a recommendation?

I think I've mentioned to people before that if I ever went back to school to get my PhD, I would like to teach a class on the media. Primarily so I could tear it apart. I think the media experiment in this country has been a massive failure and, overall, the media has done as much to misinform the general populace as it has done to actually inform the general populace. In fact, with corporatization of the media, I don't think "informing the public" is even part of the mission statement anymore. And that's too bad. We can't have an informed democratic population when businesses are financially rewarded for misinformation. As Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it". 

My criticism of the media aside, I think there is a massive communal advantage to daily or occasional reading of local newspapers/websites. I just started reading some of the Patch sites (for work reasons mostly) and I have to say, I think they do an excellent job of building a connection to the "community" that in many senses is lacking in these hyper-individualized times we are living in. Is there a lot of hard-hitting journalism on these sites? No, not really. Are a lot of the stories fluffy? Absolutely. But they are fluffy stories about your friends and neighbors. They are fluffy stories about fundraising and charitable drives. They contain information about town zoning board meetings and legislative discussions that are frequently unattended. They notify you about local concerts and children friendly events that normally go unnoticed. In short, they do a good job of covering the activities of volunteers, teachers, and politicians that normally go uncovered. While this type of media coverage may confer some incumbency advantages for local politicians, it also does a lot of good undermining the absurd notion that politicians and community activists are corrupt scoundrels out to line their own pockets. Because, for 95% of the local politicians I know, this is absolutely not the case.

What an outfit like Patch does is remind us that we belong to a community of neighbors, not just Facebook friends and Twitter followers. I am not one to bemoan technological advances. I think Facebook and Twitter have been a massive force for good, and my social capital is infinitely larger thanks to my enduring relationships with old work and grad school friends. But enduring friendships with old friends, technologically-based or otherwise, can get in the way of connecting with our immediate neighbors. I know I am guilty of this myself. As Robert Putnam would note in Bowling Alone, American levels of social capital are at all-time lows. And these low levels of social-capital have already doomed progress in places as advanced as Italy (see Making Democracy Work, also by Putnam). I dare say they are doing the same in the U.S. We need to take active steps to reverse these trends and unite our communities.

While I think Putnam overstated the beneficial advantages of social and fraternal clubs like the Elks Lodge, I think his overall point is well-taken. We need to foster means to create social and political capital if we want Americans to trust and believe in government again. And I think one strong way to do so is to read your hyper-local news outlets. I'm not just talking about Newsday and News 12 (which, honestly, I could take'em or leave'em). I'm talking about your Patch sites as well as your East Hampton Stars, your Suffolk Times, your Long Island Herald, etc. [The LI Press is an excellent investigative newspaper actually, but it hardly fits into my "building social capital model". I like the LI Press, but it does a better job of tearing our politicians down, rather than building them up. Which is fine! There is a need for that!]

But I really do think you can do yourself and your community a lot of good just by checking in with these outlets from time-to-time. I'm not saying you'll learn anything ground-breaking or life-altering, but it's an important reminder that you have neighbors that want to improve your local community. And who knows? Maybe you can take a moment to help those people? It's always nice to come across people who can help curb our own cynicism, even if it's temporary. God knows I need to from time to time...

News Corp & My Yankees

I haven't entirely thought through the ramifications of this transaction yet, but let's just say I'm extraordinarily worried that the scumbag who sent the tweet below can potentially own 80% of the YES network.

In some ways, I respect Rupert Murdoch. He doesn't really hide the fact that he openly advocates for global policies that narrowly benefit himself and a small slice of fellow trillionaires. He's refreshingly honest about it actually. He doesn't see the need to maintain the fiction of the "wall of separation" between News Corp's executives and its editorial staff. They are one and the same.

However, I just get that icky feeling when I think of News Corp owning the YES Network. I know Murdoch isn't buying the Yankees per se, but by design, the network and the Yankees have been inexorably linked since the channel's inception. I had been led to understand that this partnership has been amazingly lucrative for the Yankees since the YES broadcast debut in 2002. So I guess I don't understand the Steinbrenners reason for selling. I don't believe they were experiencing any financial difficulties and they weren't dealing with the Madoff scandal like the NY Mets. So I'm not sure what's going on exactly. All I know is I am worried how this reduced revenue stream will affect Yankee spending decisions.

I understand outside criticism of Yankees spending habits (and I heartily embrace the Evil Empire moniker), but, personally, I love it. Some Yankees fans get personally offended by bad contracts, but they don't really bother me. It's not my money. What the fuck do I care? It's nice to be able to root for a team that can absorb multi-million dollar blunders like AJ Burnett, Carl Pavano, and Kevin Brown. But selling off the YES network to News Corp gives me pause. Will the Yankees be able to absorb bad contracts like Tex and ARod when we're not flush with YES money. I can't find the angle here.

Like I said, I haven't thought this all the way through yet. I just like writing dimwitted blog posts immediately after news is released in order to maximize google search results. Ka-ching!!! [Is what I would say if I had some kind of ad-revenue-generating model on my blog].

Don't leave us Newt!

As a Democrat, I of course am rooting for the optimum amount of chaos and confusion in the Republican primary nomination process. Many Democrats believe (rightly I suspect), that Rick Santorum is the more easily defeated candidate in the Republican field, and as such, are rooting for Newt Gingrich to drop out so it can be (essentially) a two-way race between the bat-shit crazy Rick Santorum and the gaffe-prone, flip-flopping plutocrat, Mitt Romney. They believe (somewhat rightly, somewhat wrongly), that Gingrich's removal would consolidate the conservative voting bloc into a Rick Santorum Voltron that could possibly dethrone the presumptive nominee Mitt Romney. The press has embraced this theory as well. As such, the conventional wisdom has emerged that Santorum needs Gingrich to drop out in order to win the nomination. This, in a word, is wrong.

Why is this so wrong? Well, when the media covers presidential races, they like to cover and create stories (narratives), not report mathematical realities. This is why the media pretended that Hillary Clinton could win the Democratic nomination in 2008 WELL WELL WELL after the race was mathematically conclusive. I mean, these people have newspapers to promote, or blogs to pimp, or commercials on shitty cable television shows to sell. Conflict sells. Inevitability does not.

What does the math tell us in this case? Well, Santorum can't win enough delegates to take the nomination outright. Period. Even if Gingrich dropped out, and Santorum gained every single Gingrich voter (a HIGHLY dubious assertion), Santorum could not win enough of the remaining delegates needed to win the nomination. As it stands, Santorum would have to win 69% of the remaining delegates to reach the magical 1,144 needed to secure the nomination. Romney needs to win 48%. Latest polls show that, at a minimum, roughly a quarter of Newt supporters would jump to Romney. Without full-fledged Gingrich supporter backing, there is no logistical way Santorum wins 69% of the remaining delegates.

No, the best route to the nomination for Santorum (his only route to the nomination), is to prevent Romney from receiving 48% of the remaining delegates and then taking it to a brokered convention, where conservatives can finally coalesce around their conservative lunatic of choice. And the best way to prevent Romney from winning 48% of the remaining delegates is to field as many viable candidates as possible - that includes Gingrich and the increasingly irrelevant (though in our scenario, relevant) Ron Paul. [Ironically, critics of Ron Paul have pointed out that Ron Paul appears to be acting in coordination with the Romney campaign, specifically citing Paul's track-record of attacking every single GOP candidate BUT Mitt Romney. In this case though, Paul's remaining in the race clearly hurts the Romney campaign].

Again, as somewhat who enjoys watching Republicans alienate as many voting groups as possible, I want the clown posse to keep the circus on tour. I mean, I know we say Republicans look out for rich, white men, but perhaps we can narrow that down even further. Maybe Santorum will call all rich West coast men dandies. Maybe Ron Paul will accuse all rich Northeastern men of being NAMBLA enablers. Maybe Newt will claim all white factory workers in unions in the Midwest are enthrall to a Jewish cabal. The sky is limit with these people! I say let's cut to the chase and winnow Republican voters down to its critical essence -  rich, white, racist Southerners!

So don't get anywhere Newt! Stick around Paul! The show's just getting started!

Birthers Won't Go Away

One of the reasons I avoid political discussions entirely and I prefer these one way posts where I'm essentially shouting into the wind, is because I'm familiar with much of the political psychology research on the brain's processing of new information as it interacts with ideology. Long story short, ideologues are guilty of internalizing information that coincides with their world view and rejecting all information that is inconsistent with that world view. Conservatives, unsurprisingly, are more guilty of this bias than liberals are, but that shouldn't shock anyone reading my blog. This is why conservatives en masse reject information that contradicts their ideological agenda - tax cuts do not increase government revenues, evolution and global warming is scientifically valid, George W. Bush actually increased the deficit and expanded government spending substantially more than Obama, torture is not an effective means to obtain information from suspected terrorists, etc. Instead, they discount these truths and facts as propaganda tools of the liberal media. Of course, in a world of Fox News, The Wall Street Journal and conglomerate ownership of all major media outlets, the existence of a liberal media cabal is pretty laughable. But conservatives cannot, and will not, entertain these alternate truths. Of course, the most vapid example of conservative dissonance is the idea that Barack Obama is not an American citizen. Of course, of the hundreds of thousands of Republicans who think Obama is some kind of Kenyan Muslim plant, none has put forward a compelling origin story that explains this vast conspiracy. Did a mixed-race couple during the very height of the civil rights movement really conceive a child while stationed somewhere abroad in 1961, yet had the foresight at that very moment in political history to plant a story in the both the Honolulu Advertiser and The Star Bulletin announcing the birth? That's pretty prescient. They also had the know-how and political connections, while abroad mind you, to be sure to forge Hawaiian birth certificates just in case their child decided to become America's first black president in 2008. That seems an unreasonably complicated method to go about the process since clearly a couple that was so convinced that their son was going to become President would have found a way for the American-born mother to conceive the child on American soil. It's not like they didn't know when pregnancies came to term in 1961. So why are conservatives so convinced Obama is a foreign national? Race tells part of the story, but not all of it. I mean, hated as they were by conservatives, I've never really seen it suggested that former Democratic presidential candidates Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton were not American citizens. They may not be considered "real Americans," but that is because that distinction is reserved for uneducated white people.
No, the additional factor that convinced conservatives that Barack Obama is not an American citizen, in addition to his race, is clearly his name. I know - pretty stupid right? But his blackness, in concert with his unique name, is enough to convince conservatives of his "otherness". They really don't need anything more than that. I don't think we would be having this discussion all the time if Barack Obama was named Michael Washington. And no amount of evidence will convince conservatives that Obama was born in the U.S. Liberals and rational sane independents may have believed the question of Obama's nationality was to put to rest when he finally released his "long-form birth certificate" - you know, whatever the fuck that is. Well, to some extant, this effort was successful. Before the release of the certificate, only 55% country believed that Obama was born in the United States. That's a pretty pathetic accounting of political knowledge in this country, but at least the number jumped to 67% after he released the document. "Yay for new information! Maybe voters can internalize this stuff!" Of course, that number is already down to 59%, meaning 41% of this country once again isn't sure if Obama was born in the U.S. Sigh. But here's the really crazy fucking number.  According to the same study conducted by Adam Berinsky, the number of Republicans who believe that Barack Obama was born in the U.S. is actually lower now than it was before the release of the birth certificate. 73% of Republicans are either unsure of or actively believe that Barack Obama was born outside of the United States where it was 70% previously. That's an absurd level of craziness, even for the hive-like mind that we call conservative thinking. I want to be clear that I am not being hyperbolic when I say that a democracy cannot function effectively in conditions such as these. People get all upset when 13-year-olds can't tell you who the country's Vice President is but this level of political ignorance is much more dangerous. When such a vast proportion of the American populace (and its elected officials) thinks the commander-in-chief is an illegitimate usurper, those individuals will do anything in their power to grind government to a halt and overthrow the "usurper". This an unsustainable climate for a functional democracy. Unfortunately, I have no idea how it is to be overcome.