and Bridges, and Staples, and Clinton...

The News-Gazette ran a frontpage story titled "Agencies Dealing with Large-Scale Changes Since Jan. 1" regarding the changes they've seen since the "reformed" Illinois FOIA law went into effect. I'm unsure what "large-scale changes" they are speaking of, as that is unclear from the article. Mostly, it's more whining from officials who should have been conducting OUR government in a more open fashion all along, instead of coming up with phony excuses to deny the public information there was little or NO reason to withhold. These officials seem to still  be stuck in a rut from the past.

What took the cake was Champaign City Attorney Fred Stavins's quote that "not all FOIA requests are the same. Some FOIA requests are made by serious journalists, some made by casual journalists. Some people just have a (bone) to pick, and that's OK, too. But it's all a cost to citizens."

Stavins shoudl remember that the law is the law and doesn't distinguish between journalists -- whether "serious" or "casual" -- or ordinary citizens. It Stavins himself who sees such distinctions and wants to make some big deal out of them. His should just do his job and quit making excuses, which is what the law is about. The new law is intended to end the excuses. He needs to get on with the people's business or find another job where he doesn't feel so put upon.

by David Michael Green

It would be a gigantic mistake to believe that Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid or anyone else of prominence in today's Democratic Party actually gives a damn about the fate of the American people. 

But it's not such a stretch to imagine that they might care about their own political careers.  I think the Founders of the American republic had this in mind when they wrote their blueprint for representative government, in which a politician's fate would be tied to their popularity with voters. 

Of course, it doesn't entirely work that way so much anymore because of the influence of big-monied players, but if it did we'd still be left with another big problem:  These idiots don't even know how to save their own skins by governing well.  Few things have amazed me more over the last year than how incompetent President Obama has been, given the exemplary skills of Candidate Obama, who ran a near-perfect, textbook campaign. 

So, Barack Baby, I know you couldn't care less about the American public, but just in case you might still care about your own legacy and perhaps even winning a second term, might I be of some assistance? 

Here, for your reading pleasure and educational benefit is The Complete Idiot's Guide To Governing (and you are a complete idiot when it comes to governing).  I've laid it all out for you.  You don't even have to take notes. 

FIRST, PICK AN ISSUE THAT PEOPLE CARE ABOUT.  Is the American health care system a problem for this country, especially in the long term?  You betcha.  But most people are not very focused on health care right now.  They are, on the other hand, really, really focused and fearful about their jobs.  Such economic insecurity is not just "this year's issue", like say the war was in 2006.  This is existential.  People are staring out over the edge of a cliff and down into their own personal abyss.  You cannot address ANY other issue under circumstances like that.  Even in normal times, people "vote their pocketbook", let alone during the Great Recession.  Nobody gets out of a Poli Sci 101 class without learning that simple fact.  So how did the president of the United States get all the way to the White House without doing so?  Barack Obama has spent virtually all of his political capital, and that of his comrades in Congress too, on an issue way down in priority for most Americans right now, while almost entirely ignoring the single thing they are obsessed about.  This would be like, say, invading Iraq in response to an attack launched at you from Afghanistan.  I wonder how that would work out for a president? 

SECOND, STAKE OUT THE HIGH MORAL GROUND.  If you're trying to do something as president - and especially if you're trying to do something big - you have to be bold and you have to sell it bold.  There needs to be a big problem to be solved.  You need to be offering a big solution to the problem.  Your position has to be the only morally defensible one.  It doesn't hurt if you can identify some sort of enemy, too.  You have to get people excited, motivated, passionate and afraid to not get on board with your solution.  That will not happen if you offer them half-measures backed by a wimpy lack of conviction.  Imagine if Roosevelt had gone to Congress on December 8th, 1941 and said, "Golly, those darn Japanese can be mean sometimes!  I urge your support for sending them a telegram strongly protesting their attack on Pearl Harbor."  Would that have motivated a nation to the sacrifices necessary to win World War II?  Would that have mobilized America?  What if LBJ had said that institutionalized racism is unfortunate, and what we must do about it is make discrimination illegal.  On Tuesday afternoons and all day Sunday, that is.  Would that have given him the wind necessary to fill his legislative sails and better the country in ways that few presidents have ever matched?  Call me crazy, but I'm guessing not. 

THIRD, KEEP IT SIMPLE AND PRINCIPLED.  Legislating properly involves attention to detail, and I certainly don't subscribe to the latest regressive appeal to the stupidity of their tea party mobs that slams Obama's health care bill for being 2000 pages long.  Just because people who get their politics from Limbaugh and Beck need stuff dumbed down in order to assuage their own wholesale inadequacies, I sure don't want my government governing on that principle.  That said, sometimes complexity in legislation means that one is tying oneself in knots, trying to avoid the simple and obvious solution to a problem.  And it is always the case, even when bills must legitimately include boatloads of detail, that they should nevertheless be rooted in simple, easily-extractable, foundational first principles, and that these should form the narrative core of how the legislation is marketed to the public.  At the end of the day, if you can get across to people that your bill will accomplish one, two or three really important, basic and necessary objectives, they won't care how many pages it runs.  If you can't do that, on the other hand, they also won't care how many pages it runs.  They're not going to support your crummy law, regardless. 

FOURTH, USE THE BULLY PULPIT.  One of the things that astonishes me about the Obama team is how little they understand the modern presidency.  It seems so clear what you need to do, because we've seen it done so many times, and we've seen it not done.  FDR, LBJ, Reagan and Lil' Bush all more or less got what they wanted as president because they understood these simple principles, while Clinton and Carter and Poppy Bush and Ford were Potemkin presidents because they didn't.  One of the key aspects of the formula is using the president's most important single power, the bully pulpit.  This means that you have to talk about your bill incessantly.  You have to talk about it with great gravitas.  You have to persuade.  You have to go over the heads of Congress, to the people, and get them to lean all over Congress like your cousin Eddy with the big coke habit who is constantly hitting you up for money.  You have to put the fear in the bellies of members about what it will cost them to be on the wrong side of public opinion.  You have to be incessant.  The model is not only crystal clear, but entirely proximate in time.  Think of the obsessive full-court-press campaign that the Bush administration ran to sell the Iraq war just back in 2002 and 2003.  Big speeches.  Loads of public appearances.  Top administration officials on every broadcast, every day.  Relentless beating of the same drum.  No distractions with other issues.  Message coordination with sympathetic pundits, public intellectuals and activists from outside the administration.  Total media domination.  Strident, urgent exhortations.  Intimidation and delegitimation of anyone who dared oppose the policy.  And so on.  Ironically, Obama has never come close to mounting a public campaign for solutions that people actually desire that would equal one-tenth of the intensity that Bush brought to the party when he took policies the public didn't want and jammed them down their throats until they begged for more. 

FIFTH, LEAN ON YOUR OWN PARTY.  Some of my favorite photos from recent history are of LBJ applying "The Johnson Treatment" to members of Congress and others who needed a bit of course correction.  This hulking president would get right up in their faces, towering over them, and causing political figures normally otherwise possessed of quite healthy egos to arch themselves over backwards in obeisance, and presumably also to minimize the amount of LBJ's spittle that ended up on their foreheads.  The guy knew how to intimidate you.  He knew how to stroke you.  He knew how to threaten you.  He knew what you cared about.  He knew your pressure points.  He knew how to appeal to your sense of history.  He knew how to take advantage of your pettiness.  He knew how to twist your arm.  And, if you were dumb enough to make it necessary for him to do so, he knew how to rip it right out of its socket.  Mostly, he just knew how to pocket your vote.  And so that's what he did.  Over and over again.  Barack Obama, on the other hand, is the polar opposite of LBJ.  He is not only being dictated to by Congress, rather than the other way around, but he actually set it up that way.  He's getting the LBJ treatment from punks on Capitol Hill, rather than giving to them.  He has stood for nothing in his negotiations on major bills, and that is precisely what he has in his pocket so far as he slinks back home, beat and bruised, wobbling down Pennsylvania Avenue.  You wanna win?  You gotta discipline your own troops first. 

SIXTH, MAKE THE OPPOSITION PAY.  Right now, regressives are taking the most outrageous pot-shots at Barack Obama, Democrats in Congress, and all of their legislative initiatives.  And why shouldn't they?  No one ever calls them on it.  No one ever makes them pay for it.  No one ever fires back.  No one ever ridicules them when they say ridiculous things.  No one ever shames them.  No one ever puts them on the wrong side of history.  This is a real bad governing posture, made all the worse because of who we're dealing with here.  Regressives tend to have the worst instincts imaginable, just on their own.  They're the most frightened people in the world, and they're therefore capable of anything, including lies, smears, dirty tricks, cheap attacks, personal destruction and ruining the country they claim incessantly to be so patriotic toward.  They look at thugs like Limbaugh or Rove as role models, rather than as the escaped felons that they actually are.  They are more than a problem, just left to their own devices.  You cannot add to the problem by incentivizing their criminal behavior.  Anybody who wants to govern effectively needs to make opponents pay for their opposition.  Obama and the Democrats in Congress, on the other hand, have made opposition to them pay off for their opponents.  A year ago, the Great-big Old Pigs party was so smashed to bits from its own insane politics, it looked like the thing could seriously be toast.  Now, they are right back in contention, and poised for smashing victories in the next two election cycles.  All because they called Democrats socialists, fascists and granny-killers, and no one ever made them eat their scorched earth destructive lies. 

SEVENTH, BET THE FARM.  If you're pushing some big legislative package, you might as well act like you're betting the farm, ‘cause you are.  Look at the Democrats today.  They've hardly made the slightest case for the urgency of their stimulus or bail-out or health care legislation.  They've hardly telegraphed to anyone that these are all-in questions, for which they're willing to risk a lot, and punish a lot.  And yet they are, in fact, high-stakes gambles, regardless of how Democrats treat them, because their opponents have made them that.  The Dumb Dems have therefore managed to realize the worst of all worlds.  Whether they like it or not, they live or die on the hill of these bills.  But mostly die.  Their legislative agenda has been so badly botched that it is hard to say now which will cause them more damage with voters, passing a health care bill or failing to.  The worst possible approach here is to take half-measures and let your opponents turn them into full ones.  It's lose-lose scenario, well fit for chumps like those in today's Democratic Party.  Instead, someone who really understands how all this works would've raised the stakes, right from the get-go. 

And that's it, folks.  That's how you govern in Washington.  That's how you win. 

On the other hand, if being a crash-test dummy is more to your liking, there's a formula for that too.  What you do is pick the wrong issue, take some mealy-mouthed embarrassingly nothingburger position on it, make your pitch incredibly complex so the public neither understands it nor can rally behind any core moral principles, fail to use the bully pulpit to sell it, don't lean on your own party to fall into line, don't make it expensive for your opponents to trash you and your bill, and let them define the stakes. 

Maybe you've seen that approach before, eh?  Like every morning of this last year, when you open your newspaper, perhaps? 

All evidence suggests that Barack Obama is a pretty smart guy.  And, unless he's some sort of alien pod-growth creature, he's lived through the same epoch of American history I have. 

You just wouldn't know it, though, watching him in action. 

He's an awfully nice guy.  He seems like a good father.  Maybe he's even a swell dancer, too.  I dunno. 

He just doesn't know squat about how to govern. 

David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles (mailto:dmg@regressiveantidote.net), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work can be found at his website, www.regressiveantidote.net.

by Brian Stelter and Jenna Wortham

The Federal Communications Commission is proposing an ambitious 10-year plan that will reimagine the nation’s media and technology priorities by establishing high-speed Internet as the country’s dominant communication network.

The plan, which will be submitted to Congress on Tuesday, is likely to generate debate in Washington and a lobbying battle among the telecommunication giants, which over time may face new competition for customers. Already, the broadcast television industry is resisting a proposal to give back spectrum the government wants to use for future mobile service.

The blueprint reflects the government’s view that broadband Internet is becoming the common medium of the United States, gradually displacing the telephone and broadcast television industries. It also signals a shift at the F.C.C., which under the administration of President George W. Bush gained more attention for policing indecency on the television airwaves than for promoting Internet access.

According to F.C.C. officials briefed on the plan, the commission’s recommendations will include a subsidy for Internet providers to wire rural parts of the country now without access, a controversial auction of some broadcast spectrum to free up space for wireless devices, and the development of a new universal set-top box that connects to the Internet and cable service.

The effort will influence billions of dollars in federal spending, although the F.C.C. will argue that the plan should pay for itself through the spectrum auctions. Some recommendations will require Congressional action and industry support, and will affect users only years from now.

Still, “each bullet point will trigger its own tortuous battle,” said Craig Moffett, a senior analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company.

For much of the last year, Julius Genachowski, the F.C.C. chairman and the plan’s chief salesman, has laid the groundwork for the Congressionally mandated plan by asserting that the United States is lagging far behind other countries in broadband adoption and speed. About a third of Americans have no access to high-speed Internet service, cannot afford it or choose not to have it.

In a speech last month, Mr. Genachowski observed that the country could build state-of-the-art computers and applications, but without equivalent broadband wiring, “it would be like having the technology for great electric cars, but terrible roads.”

The plan envisions a fully Web-connected world with split-second access to health care information and online classrooms, delivered through wireless devices yet to be dreamed up in Silicon Valley. But to get there, analysts say the F.C.C. must tread carefully with companies like Comcast and AT&T that largely control Internet pricing and speeds. Already, there are questions about the extent to which the F.C.C. has jurisdiction over Internet providers.

The F.C.C. says it can make some important changes on its own. They include reforms to the Universal Service Fund, which spends $8 billion a year from telephone surcharges to ensure that rural and poor people have phone lines at home. It also supplies Internet access to schools, libraries and rural clinics.

By reducing the phone subsidies over time, the fund could instead “support broadband access and affordability,” especially in remote locations where private companies have little incentive to build networks, said Colin Crowell, a senior counselor to Mr. Genachowski.

In recent weeks, the most-talked-about idea in the television industry has been a voluntary auction of over-the-air spectrum for future mobile broadband uses. In total, the F.C.C. is hoping to free up roughly 500 megahertz of spectrum, much of which would come from television broadcasters, which would be compensated if Congress acts.

The proposal already faces resistance from the TV industry. Stations say they still serve a valuable public service, especially during emergencies, and say the F.C.C. proposals could cause gaps in signal coverage.

But F.C.C. officials assert that the spectrum changes are necessary given a looming spectrum shortage. “It isn’t a crisis tomorrow, it’s a crisis in five or six years,” Mr. Crowell said, but allocation “literally takes years.”

The plan will advise that some of the spectrum become unlicensed, so it can serve as a test bed for new technologies.

Also notably, the plan will include an initiative the chairman calls 100 Squared — equipping 100 million households with high-speed Internet gushing through their pipes at 100 megabits a second by the end of this decade. According to comScore, the average subscriber now receives speeds of three to four megabits a second.

The government is “setting a stake in the ground by setting a standard for broadband speeds in order to be a competitive nation,” said Dan Hays, director of PRTM, a global management consulting firm in the telecommunications industry.

He said the plan could place “significant pressure” on incumbent providers to improve their networks.

Mr. Genachowski also argues that broadband expansion can be an economic stimulant, a crucial selling point in a time of high unemployment. “Broadband will be the indispensable platform to assure American competitiveness, ongoing job creation and innovation, and will affect nearly every aspect of Americans’ lives at home, at work, and in their communities,” he said Friday.

According to officials briefed on the proposals, the plan will also call for a “digital literacy corps” to help unwired Americans learn online skills, and recommendations for $12 billion to $16 billion for a nationwide public safety network that would connect police, fire departments and other first responders.

In a move that could affect policy decisions years from now, the F.C.C. will begin assessing the speeds and costs of consumer broadband service. Until then, consumers can take matters into their own hands with a new suite of online and mobile phone applications released by the F.C.C. that will allow them to test the speed of their home Internet and see if they’re paying for data speeds as advertised.

“Once again, the F.C.C. is putting service providers on the spot,” said Julien Blin, a telecommunications consultant at JBB Research.

Copyright 2010 New York Times

News that wages are rising in China is greeted with dread by those who share Greenspan's unwarranted fear of rising inflation

by Mark Weisbrot

Speaking of the media blackout on such debate and the brief lifting of it due to the debate yesterday, that apparently didn't make it down to the News-Gazette. There was nothing about it in this morning's paper. Our Rep. Tim Johnson was one of five Republican's who voted for withdrawal from Afghanistan by the end of 2010, which failed 65-356.

BTW, if one of the editors sees this, could you please cleanup the mess I made of posting it?

The fact that you're still bitching about it a YEAR after it happened shows two things: 1) You are far too weak and emotionally fragile to be trusted with power even in the event that you WOULD be able to get it...

Umm, it was you who thought it was so important to revive a nearly year-old thread by trolling through here today.

As for anyone being "too weak and fragile to rule," as a white guy myself it sure shows when someone is so full of his own white supremacism that he misses the fact that a more diverse polity might conceive of a community that didn't need the idea of dominance over others to construct the idea of a nation. But that's just me.

Come back when mid-terms at the Objectivist Academy are over with and you want a thoughful discussion with adults.

DENVER (AP) — Colorado lawmakers trying to regulate marijuana dispensaries are asking the U.S. attorney general to stop raids of medical marijuana operations.

The group e-mailed the request to Eric Holder on Monday, following up on a letter sent last week.

The lawmakers say the raids are discouraging dispensary operators and medical marijuana patients and growers from working with them on the proposed regulations.

The letter was sent by Sens. Chris Romer and Nancy Spence and Reps. Tom Massey and Beth McCann.

A suburban Denver man has been charged with possession in federal court after agents raided his home and found 224 pot plants. Agents have also raided two laboratories that test medical marijuana after their owners applied for drug licenses.

I'm just putting it out there....

I think if someone planned on ruining the signs, I think they could do much worse than just bending the corners. 

Hypothetically, if it was a hate crime, the perpetrators could put a much bigger dent in the signs.

Just saying.....