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Thursday, February 28, 2013

Buried Bodies: A Provocative Web Ad

A number of posts have presented unusual campaign ads. Kevin James, an underdog candidate for mayor of Los Angeles, has a provocative web ad that compares his opponents to shady characters burying a body:

The Revolving Door and New Lawmakers

The revolving door goes two ways, and it works for staffers as well as for members of Congress. The more well-traveled direction is from government to corporation, trade group or other organization, often for more money than an individual can make working for Uncle Sam.

It's less common for people to go the other way, from the private sector to government, unless they've been elected to serve on Capitol Hill. But it does happen. In fact, according to an analysis by Remapping Debate and the Center for Responsive Politics, 41 high-ranking staffers for new members of Congress came from organizations that have a lobbying presence in Washington.
Hiring a staffer with experience in lobbying can be extremely helpful for a new lawmaker who needs to quickly build connections and might be concerned about securing funds for re-election. In many cases, legislators seemed to pick like-minded staffers, or at least ones with an extensive Rolodex who might be able to advance their pet causes.

Sequestration and Reporting

Previous posts have discussed the politics of "sequestration" -- the across the board cuts that will happen as a result of budget deadlock.  The Washington Post reports:
The descriptions of the post-sequester landscape that have been coming out of the Obama Administration have been alarming, specific--and, in at least some cases, hyped.
“There are literally teachers now who are getting pink slips, who are getting notices that they can’t come back this fall,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
The descriptions of the post-sequester landscape that have been coming out of the Obama Administration have been alarming, specific--and, in at least some cases, hyped.
“There are literally teachers now who are getting pink slips, who are getting notices that they can’t come back this fall,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
At USA Today, Richard Benedetto reports that many media outlets uncritically accepted Duncan's claim. He adds:
Big national news media are not the only ones quick to fan budget-cutting fears. A front-page headline in the Omaha World Herald warned, "Furloughs would mean pay cuts for thousands at Offutt," a huge Air Force base there. The story included a similar lack of skepticism and was repeated in similarly localized versions all across the country.

Such stories have been commonplace since Obama grimly strode into an auditorium in the White House last week, stood in front of a carefully staged backdrop of uniformed first responders and condemned congressional Republicans for taking a"meat cleaver" approach to budget cuts.
"Are you willing to see a bunch of first responders lose their jobs because you want to protect a special interest tax loophole? Are you willing to have teachers laid off?" he asked.
As Obama expected, his words of woe were broadcast, printed and blogged, warning that these cuts must be avoided at all costs or the world as we know it will end.
Of course the cuts will have an impact on people employed by the government or dependent on government programs. However, journalists must be aware that claims of disaster are a decades-old cliché used by politicians intent on stopping budget cuts as much as by conscientious officials giving the public information it needs to know. Skepticism in the original reports is just as important as follow-up a week later.

Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Reid, Django, and Movie Violence

Several weeks after warning against movie violence, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid today spoke approvingly of Django Unchained, which one critic called " arguably the most violent movie in [director Quentin] Tarantino’s bloodstained oeuvre."

“We have too much violence in our society, and it’s not just from guns. It’s from a lot of stuff. and I think we should take a look at TV, movies, video games and weapons. And I hope that everyone will just be careful and cautious.” -- Harry Reid, on Nevada Week in Review, January 11, 2013.
"As America shapes its future it struggles with its past – a past in which equality was our principle but not always our practice. Two of the Best Picture nominees at this year’s Academy Awards – `Lincoln' and `Django Unchained' – offered cinematic treatments of the legacy of our nation’s darkest institution. One film presents an unvarnished view of the evils of slavery. The other depicts our difficult journey to end slavery." -- Harry Reid, remarks at Rosa Parks statue unveiling, February 27, 2013.

Moving from Mexico, Moving from the USA

Many posts have dealt with immigration and expatriation. Here are some fascinating data from Gallup:
As lawmakers in the United States ponder the shape and form of comprehensive immigration reform, residents of Mexico -- the country that has been the largest source of U.S.-bound immigration over the past decade -- are no more likely than U.S. residents are to express a desire to leave their home country. Eleven percent of Mexicans say they would leave their homeland if given the opportunity -- a decline of about half from 21% in 2007. Likewise, the 11% of Americans who would emigrate has changed little over the past four years.
The U.S. has long prided itself on its ability to attract rather than lose residents, and some have seen Mexico as the main hub for U.S.-bound immigration. The Gallup data call into question these long-held assumptions because as many Mexicans would leave Mexico as Americans would leave America.
The percentage of Mexicans willing to leave Mexico changed significantly over 2012. In December 2012, Mexico's desire to migrate statistic was 11% -- identical to that of the U.S. An earlier survey in May 2012, conducted during a presidential campaign that reportedly stoked popular anxieties as to the future direction of the country, found the percentage at a higher 17%, a result that may be a one-time anomaly. Overall, for 2012, an average of 14% of Mexicans said they would leave their country, a result that is not statistically significant when compared with the 11% of U.S. residents that would leave if given the opportunity

Briefs in Marriage Case

Our chapters on interest groups and the judiciary discuss the role of amicus curiae briefs, which provide a way for groups to weigh in on a case.  Fortune reports:
On Thursday, dozens of American corporations, including Apple, Alcoa, Facebook, eBay, Intel, and Morgan Stanley will submit an amicus brief in the landmark Hollingsworth v. Perry case broadly arguing to the U.S. Supreme Court that laws banning same-sex marriages, like California's ballot initiative Proposition 8, are unconstitutional under the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses.
According to a draft copy obtained by Fortune, the companies argue that such laws "send an unmistakeable signal that same-sex couples are in some way inferior to opposite-sex couples, a proposition that is anathema to amici's commitment to equality and fair treatment to all."
At least 60 companies had committed to signing the brief as of Tuesday evening, according to Joshua Rosenkranz, who is counsel of record on the brief and head of the Supreme Court and appellate litigation practice at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe. That number is expected to rise by Thursday, however, according to Rosenkranz. Others who have already committed to sign include AIG, Becton Dickinson, Cisco, Cummins, Kimpton, Levi Strauss, McGraw Hill, NCR, Nike, Office Depot, Oracle, Panasonic, Qualcomm, and Xerox. (Update: Verizon and Cablevision have now joined.
Slate reports:
Here's a story that's getting a lot of buzz this week, but for all the wrong reasons. A host of "prominent Republicans" signed a legal brief supporting gay marriage. Cool. But of the 82 GOPers on the list, only four currently hold political office, and only two at the federal level.
Among the signers is Gary Johnson, the former New Mexico governor  who ran as the Libertarian candidate for president.

Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Cuts in a Nonexistent Agency?

Our chapter on bureaucracy points out that the executive branch is extremely complex -- so much so that budget officials have trouble keeping track of exactly what is in it. Reason reports:
If you want a thorough agency-by-agency rundown of the budget cuts sequestration would deliver, the Office of Management and Budget has you covered. In compliance with The Sequestration Transparency Act of 2012, the OMB sent a detailed report to Congress in September 2012. But there's a small problem with the report: One of the cuts it warns against would affect an agency that no longer exists--and didn't exist when the OMB sent its report to Congress.

The first line item on page 121 of the OMB's September 2012 report says that under sequestration the National Drug Intelligence Center would lose $2 million of its $20 million budget. While that's slightly more than 8.2 percent (rounding error or scare tactic?), the bigger problem is that the National Drug Intelligence Center shuttered its doors on June 15, 2012--three months before the OMB issued its report to Congress.

Monday, February 25, 2013

Hispanics and Party Identification

U.S. Hispanic adults are more than twice as likely to identify as or lean Democratic than Republican, according to Gallup Daily tracking data collected throughout 2012. In total, 51% of Hispanics identified as or leaned Democratic, while a little less than a quarter (24%) identified with or leaned toward the GOP. Twenty percent were wholly independent, with no preferences for either party.
The results are based on Gallup Daily tracking data with 26,264 Hispanics collected from Jan. 1 to Dec. 31, 2012. The politics of the U.S. Hispanic population are becoming increasingly important to the future of both political parties, as the size of this group continues to grow. Many analysts say a strong, Democratically skewed Latino turnout is an important reason for President Barack Obama's re-election victory in November of last year.
Asked initially about political party identification, half of Hispanics (50%) identify as independent/other or are unsure. Thirty-two percent of Hispanics are outright Democrats and 13% are outright Republicans. The Democratic Party clearly enjoys a comfortable advantage in terms of party identification over its rival, the GOP, among Hispanic voters. However, this Democratic edge may not necessarily be permanent, as 50% of Hispanic voters initially identify with neither major political party. However, when accounting for "leaners," -- independents who prefer one party over the other -- 51% of Hispanics identify or lean with the Democratic Party and 24% opt for the Republican Party. For comparison, 79% of blacks identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party.

Natural Law and the American Creed

An earlier post excerpted Brian Vanyo's article on the origins of the American creed.  He has a new piece on the creed's meaning:
In the very first sentence of the Declaration of Independence, our founders wrote that the American people were breaking from British rule to live by the tenets of Natural Law — “to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and coequal station to which the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God entitle them.” To understand the meaning of our creed, we must come to know Natural Law.
Natural Law philosophy, which was first developed over 2,000 years ago, is the idea that universal laws govern all human interactions and that these laws, or truths, are discoverable by human reason. Aristotle wrote in Rhetoric (ca. 350 BC), “Universal law is the Law of Nature. For there really is, as everyone to some extent divines, a natural justice and injustice that is binding on all men, even on those who have no association or covenant with each other.”
...

Government is therefore bound to respect the people’s life, liberty, and property, because, as Alexander Hamilton explained, the universal Law of Nature is always and everywhere supreme:
Good and wise men, in all ages ... have supposed that the Deity ... has constituted an eternal and immutable law, which is, indispensably, obligatory upon all mankind, prior to any human institution whatever.
This is what is called the Law of Nature, “which, being coeval with mankind and dictated by God Himself, is, of course, superior in obligation to any other. It is binding over all the globe, in all countries, and at all times. No human laws are of any validity, if contrary to this; and such of them as are valid, derive all their authority, mediately, or immediately, from this original.” Blackstone.
Upon this law, depend the natural rights of mankind.
This is the meaning of our creed. We are a free people who joined in society to live by the principles of Natural Law — principles that became the purpose for our union, the cause for our independence, and the foundation for our government. These principles, of course, were proclaimed with conviction in our Declaration of Independence, which Thomas Jefferson later regarded as the “Declaratory Charter of our rights and the rights of man.”

Sunday, February 24, 2013

The Fiscal Situation

The looming sequester makes fiscal data very timely. A presentation by Douglas Elmendorf, Director of the Congressional Budget Office:



A few weeks ago, the Government Accountability Office released a report titled Financial Audit: U.S. Government’s Fiscal Years 2012 and 2011 Consolidated Financial Statements:
An important purpose of the Report is to help citizens understand current fiscal policy and the importance and magnitude of policy reforms necessary to make it sustainable. A sustainable policy is one where the debt–to-GDP ratio is ultimately stable or declining.

To determine if current fiscal policies are sustainable, the projections discussed here assume current policy will be sustained indefinitely and draw out the implications for the growth of debt held by the public as a share of GDP. The projections are therefore neither forecasts nor predictions. As policy changes are enacted, then actual financial outcomes will of course be different than those projected.

The projections presented in this Report were finalized prior to the enactment of the American Taxpayer Relief Act (ATRA) in January 2013.

The projections in this Report indicate that current policy is not sustainable. The debt-to-GDP ratio is projected to reach 395 percent in 2087 and to rise continuously thereafter. Preventing the debt-to-GDP ratio from rising over the next 75 years is estimated to require some combination of spending reductions and revenue increases that amount to 2.7 percent of GDP over the period. While this estimate of the “75-year fiscal gap” is highly uncertain, current fiscal policies cannot be sustained indefinitely.


Opinion on Federal Spending

Pew reports that Americans are not eager for budget cuts in specific areas:

As the March 1 deadline for a possible budget sequester approaches, a new national survey finds limited public support for reducing spending for a range of specific programs, including defense, entitlements, education and health care.
For 18 of 19 programs tested, majorities want either to increase spending or maintain it at current levels. The only exception is assistance for needy people around the world. Nonetheless, as many say that funding for aid to the needy overseas should either be increased (21%), or kept the same (28%), as decreased (48%).

Using a different kind of question, Gallup reaches slightly different findings on defense:
As steep cuts in defense spending are scheduled to take place on March 1 unless the federal government acts to prevent them, Americans show no clear consensus on current U.S. defense spending. Thirty-six percent say the U.S. spends the right amount on the military and national defense, 35% say it spends too much, and 26% too little. In the prior two years, the plurality of Americans said too much was spent on defense.
Previous posts have shown that Americans have only a shaky grasp of basic fiscal dataAt Bloomberg, Julie Davis reports that misinformation remains widespread:
At the same time, the size and trajectory of the U.S. deficit is poorly understood by most Americans, with 62 percent saying it’s getting bigger, 28 percent saying it’s staying about the same this year, and just 6 percent saying it’s shrinking. The Congressional Budget Officereported Feb. 6 that the federal budget deficit is getting smaller, falling to $845 billion this year -- the first time in five years that the gap between taxes and spending will be less than $1 trillion.
Americans also have a skewed picture of what drives federal spending.
At least half correctly pegged defense programs, Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid -- both of which comprise about one fifth of the federal budget -- as accounting for at least 20 percent of federal spending. Yet almost a third of respondents say the same about education -- which actually comprises 2 percent of the budget -- and foreign aid -- which registers at just 1 percent of federal spending. Almost 40 percent of respondents say the social safety net, including food stamps and jobless benefits, make up at least a fifth of the federal budget; in fact, such programs amount to about 13 percent of total spending.
The full results of the Bloomberg poll are here. 

Saturday, February 23, 2013

Oscars and Political Money

Previous posts have discussed the political leanings of the entertainment industry. The Center for Responsive Politics reports on the contribution patterns of Academy Award nominees:
Of the 51 actors, directors and producers nominated for the top six categories (Best Actor/Actress, Best Supporting Actor/Actress, Best Director and Best Picture), 25 nominees or their spouses have contributed to a political candidate or committee since 1990. Most supported Obama either in 2008 or 2012, or both. And in Congress, Oscar nominees tended to play favorites with Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.),Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) and Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.).
...

The only Republican contributions from the crowd of Oscar nominee-political donors -- since 1990 -- also came from Spielberg, but they're practically ancient. He gave Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter and Rudy Svorinich, a Republican on the Los Angeles City Council, $1,000 each in the 1998 election, and sent another $2,000 to Specter in 2004. He followed up with a $2,400 check to Specter after he switched parties to become a Democrat.

Whose Sequester?

Starting last fall, President Obama and his aide Jack Lew (now his nominee for Treasury Secretary) said that the automatic spending cuts -- the "sequester" -- were the Republicans' idea.  At The Washington Post, Bob Woodward writes:
The president and Lew had this wrong. My extensive reporting for my book “The Price of Politics” shows that the automatic spending cuts were initiated by the White House and were the brainchild of Lew and White House congressional relations chief Rob Nabors — probably the foremost experts on budget issues in the senior ranks of the federal government.
Obama personally approved of the plan for Lew and Nabors to propose the sequester to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). They did so at 2:30 p.m. July 27, 2011, according to interviews with two senior White House aides who were directly involved.
...
[M]onths of White House dissembling further eroded any semblance of trust between Obama and congressional Republicans. (The Republicans are by no means blameless and have had their own episodes of denial and bald-faced message management.)
The article includes a depressing sidelight about institutional memory:
A majority of Republicans did vote for the Budget Control Act that summer, which included the sequester. Key Republican staffers said they didn’t even initially know what a sequester was — because the concept stemmed from the budget wars of the 1980s, when they were not in government.

Friday, February 22, 2013

The Washington Monument and Gold Watch Maneuvers


In our chapters on bureaucracy, Congress, and economic policy, we discuss various maneuvers of budget politics.  At The Washington Examiner, Byron York writes:
There's no doubt President Obama is using the so-called Washington Monument maneuver in the fight with Republicans over sequestration budget cuts. It's a time-honored tactic of bureaucratic warfare: When faced with cuts, pick the best-known and most revered symbol of government and threaten to shut it down. Close the Washington Monument and say, "See? This is what happens when you cut the budget." Meanwhile, all sorts of other eminently cuttable government expenditures go untouched.

So now Obama is warning of drastic cuts in food safety, air traffic control, police and fire protection -- in all sorts of services that will allegedly be slashed if the rate of growth of some parts of the federal budget is slowed.

But perhaps the biggest example of the Washington Monument maneuver is coming from the Defense Department, where it goes by another name. Over many decades of defense budget battles, the Pentagon has often used a tactic known as a "gold watch." It means to answer a budget cut proposal by selecting for elimination a program so important and valued -- a gold watch -- that Pentagon chiefs know political leaders will restore funding rather than go through with the cut.

So now, with sequestration approaching, the Pentagon has announced that the possibility of budget cuts has forced the Navy to delay deployment of the carrier USS Harry S. Truman to the Persian Gulf. With tensions with Iran as high as they've ever been, that would leave the U.S. with just one carrier, instead of the preferred two, in that deeply troubled region.

Thursday, February 21, 2013

Karl Rove and the Smell of Blood

At Politico, Maggie Haberman writes about GOP activists who disagree with strategist Karl Rove: "For the first time in a dozen years, Karl Rove’s critics smell blood."

Actually, journalists have been using this figure of speech for a long time.


In 2007, Chris Matthews said: "Democrats are frustrated that Rove wasn't indicted in the CIA leak case, but now that he's been implicated in the firing of those US attorneys, it looks to some people as though Democrats are smelling blood."

In 2007, Wolf Blitzer said to James Carville:  "And Democrats really are smelling blood right now, James, as you see. And their eyes are specifically focused not all completely on Alberto Gonzales, but on Karl Rove."

In 2005, The Financial Times reported: "The dust-up over Karl Rove's role in the Valerie Plame leak affair has the usually docile White House press corps smelling blood."

In 2004, Stuart Taylor wrote in National Journal:  "The many reporters who see the Bush White House as a den of dissemblers smell blood in the water. And Washington is seething with speculation that the suspects may include Rove, Libby, or perhaps other top officials."

In 2003, Howard Fineman told Chris Matthews on Hardball:  "And one of the really interesting things politically here is that one of the names that Ambassador Wilson mentioned is that of Karl Rove, who's the president's longtime political aide, really helped to architect the president's political career. That's the blood in the water that is especially exciting the sharks around town"

Reagan, Congress, and Taxes

Major points:
  • Jack Kemp pioneered tax cuts as GOP policy: Reagan followed.
  • Tax increases followed the tax cuts of 1981
  • The 1986 tax reform created strange allies and opponents.
1977:  Jack Kemp introduces the first version of the Kemp-Roth tax cut bill
1978:  Proposition 13 in California elevates tax-cutting as a political issue.
1980:  Reagan adopts the Kemp approach; Bush disagrees during the primaries.
1980:  Reagan defeats Carter, GOP wins the Senate for the first time since the 1952 election and makes major gains in the House.
1981:  Congress approves sweeping tax bill with across-the-board cuts.  The key vote in the House takes place on July 29, when it passes an administration-backed substitute to the committee bill:


Yes
No
Republicans
190
1
Northern Democrats
12
151
Southern Democrats
36
43
Total
238
195
.
1982: Reagan backs the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act, which modifies some of the 1981 business tax cuts and imposes new excise taxes, for an estimated revenue gain of $98 billion over 3 years.  Reagan regrets he legislation, believing that Democrats had reneged on spending cuts. Newt Gingrich accuses Reagan of “trying to score a touchdown for liberalism, for the liberal welfare state, for big government, for the Internal Revenue Service, for multinational corporations, and for the various forces that consistently voted against the president.”
1982:  Reagan approves a nickel-a-gallon gas tax increase to pay for mass transit and highway repairs. 
1983:  Reagan endorses payroll tax increases recommended by the commission on Social Security reform.
1984:  In his State of the Union Address, Reagan says he is asking Treasury Secretary Regan to make specific recommendations on tax reform -- the month after the election.
1984:  Reagan signs legislation to raise taxes $50 billion through fiscal 1987, mostly by closing loopholes and increasing taxpayer compliance.
1984:  With a comma, the GOP platform commits the party to oppose tax increases.
1984:  Walter Mondale promises to raise taxes, and Reagan uses the issue in the campaign.
1985:  Reagan proposes sweeping tax reform.  After he makes a nationwide address in favor of the idea, Ways and Means Chair Dan Rostenkowski makes an address of his own, largely in support.
1985:  House Republicans join with dissident Democrats to defeat the rule for considering the tax bill. Reagan eventually gets enough of them to change their votes so the bill can proceed.
1986:  After Senator Robert Packwood reverses his earlier reluctance and redrafts the bill in an alcoholic haze, the Senate passes its version.  The bill soon reaches Reagan's desk.
1986:  Polls show the public to be indifferent at best.  Later polls show widespread disapproval.  Republicans lose the Senate in the 1986 midterm.
2013:  Vast majority of House members and senators have no firsthand experience of the 1986 reform.

Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Think Tanks and Interest Groups

Our chapter on interest groups (see esp. pp. 243-244 of the 2d edition) considers the role of think tanks and notes that they have come under fire for short-term analysis instead of careful deliberation about first principles. Taking off from the resignation of Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) to take a high-paying job as head of the the Heritage Foundation, The New Republic, Ken Silverstein writes:
There are plenty of well-respected scholars at prominent Beltway think-tank positions. But supporting such large organizations requires the same ceaseless fundraising that politicians conduct when running for reelection—and the same sort of ignoble temptations. “Things have to be paid for, I respect that,” one former think tank staffer, who quit his job in disgust due to the intellectual horse-trading he observed, told me. “But at some point it becomes hard to turn down money from [big donors] and then it becomes hard not to do their bidding.”
Think tanks prefer to get general funding that they can use however they like. Donors, though, want measurable impact and are increasingly inclined to offer short-term funding earmarked for specific projects. Even centrist, mainstream organizations use the ability to target and influence policymakers as a way to entice donors. For example, a CSIS pitch to donors says the think tank is “in a unique position to bring together leaders of both the public and private sectors in small, often off-the-record meetings to build consensus around important policy issues.”
Nowadays if donors don’t like the results they get, they are increasingly inclined to move their money to more compliant think tanks, or to more expressly political operations. “Think tanks are competing with consulting firms, law firms, Super PACS, lobbyists and advocacy groups,” says James McGann, director of the Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program at the University of Pennsylvania. “That puts pressure on think tanks to be more responsive to donors.” The new buzz term among private and public donors is “high impact philanthropy,” McCann says.
“Think tanks have become more like PR and lobbying shops than research organizations,” says Steve Clemons, a former executive vice president at the New America Foundation. “That they’re lesser regulated than lobbyists makes them especially attractive to some funders.”

Tuesday, February 19, 2013

The White House and Interview Transcripts

The Politico story on presidential press management calls to mind a related issue. In 2009, I noted that the White House website was failing to post transcripts of many presidential media interviews. Though the website has become more user-friendly,  has not become more complete.   As the Epic Journey blog has noted many times, the White House seldom posts interview transcripts anymore. While major news organizations often post their own transcripts of presidential interviews, smaller papers and broadcast stations usually do not. The approach makes life harder for reporters, opposition researchers, and ordinary citizens who just want to know what their president has said.

Foreign-Born Population

The Pew Research Hispanic Center has a new report on the foreign born population of the United States: Some data on citizenship

There are now almost as many foreign-born people from South and East Asia as from Mexico -- a major shift.

POTUS and the Press

In our chapters on the presidency and the mass media, we discuss relations between the chief executive and the press. At Politico, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen write that President Obama has taken media management to a new level:
President Barack Obama is a master at limiting, shaping and manipulating media coverage of himself and his White House.
Not for the reason that conservatives suspect: namely, that a liberal press willingly and eagerly allows itself to get manipulated. Instead, the mastery mostly flows from a White House that has taken old tricks for shaping coverage (staged leaks, friendly interviews) and put them on steroids using new ones (social media, content creation, precision targeting). And it’s an equal opportunity strategy: Media across the ideological spectrum are left scrambling for access.
The results are transformational. With more technology, and fewer resources at many media companies, the balance of power between the White House and press has tipped unmistakably toward the government. This is an arguably dangerous development, and one that the Obama White House — fluent in digital media and no fan of the mainstream press — has exploited cleverly and ruthlessly. And future presidents from both parties will undoubtedly copy and expand on this approach.
“The balance of power used to be much more in favor of the mainstream press,” said Mike McCurry, who was press secretary to President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Nowadays, he said, “The White House gets away with stuff I would never have dreamed of doing. When I talk to White House reporters now, they say it’s really tough to do business with people who don’t see the need to be cooperative.”

Monday, February 18, 2013

Cruz and Gramm


Jonathan Weisman writes in the New York Times about Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX):
In just two months, Mr. Cruz, 42, has made his presence felt in an institution where new arrivals are usually not heard from for months, if not years. Besides suggesting that Mr. Hagel might have received compensation from foreign enemies, he has tangled with the mayor of Chicago, challenged the Senate’s third-ranking Democrat on national television, voted against virtually everything before him — including the confirmation of John Kerry as secretary of state — and raised the hackles of colleagues from both parties.
Is Cruz's brash Senate debut unprecedented?  Not quite.  In some ways, he's following the in path of another  Texan, Phil GrammOn March 30, 1986, Steven V. Roberts wrote in The New York Times:
HOW DOES A FIRST-TERM SENATOR become the driving force behind such a major piece of legislation?
One answer is the changing structure of Congress itself. Reforms adopted in the wake of Watergate eroded the rule of seniority. Moreover, the leadership has lost much of its ability to enforce institutional inhibitions against wayward behavior. ''Gramm represents the fact that you can get away with it,'' says Ross Baker of Rutgers.
Gramm has repeatedly defied Congressional norms and gotten away with it. Earlier this year, when he was on a television program with Senator Daniel P. Moynihan, Gramm described the New York Democrat as ''one of the weakest'' supporters of national defense in Congress.
Moynihan retorted angrily that his record had been misrepresented and said, ''You're one year in the Senate, fella, you don't do that to another Senator.'' But in Gramm's view, you can do almost anything to another Senator if you feel he is wrong. Asked about his statement, Gramm replied that he had no brief for liberals like Moynihan who were ''crying alligator tears'' over the defense budget.

Eight Random Things Presidents Never Said

For Presidents' Day:

"When governments fear the people, there is liberty," Jefferson did not say. "When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government."

Jefferson did not say: "My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government."

"I am not bound to win, but I'm bound to be true," Lincoln did not say. "I'm not bound to succeed, but I'm bound to live up to what light I have."

"As a result of the war,"Lincoln did not say, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow."

"We are a great country because we are a good country," Lincoln did not say -- and neither did Tocqueville.

"I am in favor of animal rights as well as human rights," Lincoln really really did not say.


"It’s a great invention," Rutherford B. Hayes did not say of the telephone, "but who would ever want to use one?" 

Nixon did not say that he had a "secret plan" to end the Vietnam War.

The Constitution and Slavery

The Constitution's provisions dealing with slavery remain newsworthy even in 2013.

Ordinary people have played a part in constitutional history.  A student was crucial in adding the 27th Amendment. At The Atlantic, Adam Clark Estes writes:
A middle-aged recent immigrant from India recently set into motion a series of events that eventually led to Mississippi finally retifying the Constitutional amendment banning slavery. The rousing finale of the movie Lincoln served as inspiration. It sounds like a joke, but it's true. And even though it's been nearly 150 years since that fateful day in the Capitol in 1864, Mississippi's becoming the final state to officially ratify the Thirteenth Amendment serves as the final punctuation mark on a dark chapter in American history.

The circumstances for Dr. Ranjan Batra almost inadvertently inserting herself into Mississippi state history are accidental at best. After seeing Lincoln in theaters last November, he went home and did a little bit of Internet research only to discover the Mississippi never got around to actually ratifying the amendement. The state did vote to ratify the amendment back in 1995, nearly 20 years after Kentucky, the second-to-last state to ratify the amendment, held its vote. However, through an apparent clerical error, Mississippi never officially notified the United States Archivist of the ratification, meaning that they've officially been on the side of slavery for a century-and-a-half. (That sounds kind of sensational when you put it like that, but heck, you'd think the state would double check on an issue as big as this.) Batra and his friend Ken Sullivan reported the mistake up the chain of command, and this month, Mississippi finally sent in the paperwork to complete its belated ratification of the Thirteen Amendment.
Emory University President James Wagner has infuriated many on his campus and scholars elsewhere by using the president's letter in the new issue of Emory Magazine to say that the "three-fifths compromise" of the U.S. Constitution was a model for how people who disagree can work together for "a common goal."
Following an explosion of social media criticism Saturday as word of Wagner's letter spread, he released an apology. "To those hurt or confused by my clumsiness and insensitivity, please forgive me," he wrote. (The apology currently appears on top of the original letter on Emory's website, linked to in the previous paragraph.)
The three-fifths compromise expanded the political clout of the slave states by codifying that black slaves counted for purposes of allocating seats in the House of Representatives as 60 percent of a white person (even though the slave states gave black people 0 percent of the voting or other rights of white people). To many African Americans, the three-fifths compromise is among the more blatant events in which the founders of the United States explicitly denied the humanity of black people.

Sunday, February 17, 2013

A Critical View of State of the Union Speeches

George Will deplores the practice of delivering the State of the Union as a speech instead of a written message:
When the Founding generation was developing customs and manners appropriate to a republic, George Washington and John Adams made the mistake of going to Congress to do their constitutional duty of informing and recommending. Jefferson, however, disliked the sound of his voice — such an aversion is a vanishingly rare presidential virtue — and considered it monarchical for the executive to lecture the legislature, the lofty instructing underlings. So he sent written thoughts to Capitol Hill, a practice good enough for subsequent presidents until Wilson in 1913 delivered his message orally, pursuant to the progressives’ belief in inspirational and tutelary presidents.

It is beyond unseemly, it is anti-constitutional for senior military officers and, even worse, Supreme Court justices to attend these political rallies where, with metronomic regularity, legislators of the president’s party leap to their feet to whinny approval of every bromide and vow. Members of the other party remain theatrically stolid, thereby provoking brow-furrowing punditry about why John Boehner did not rise (to genuflect? salute? swoon?) when Barack Obama mentioned this or that. Tuesday night, the justices, generals and admirals, looking as awkward as wallflowers at a prom, at least stayed seated.
In any case, the speech is no longer meeting the Wilsonian goal of swaying public opinion, because the public is not watching.  Constitution Daily reports:
The final TV viewership numbers are in for President Obama’s State of the Union speech, and the broadcast hit a historic low in one of two key ratings categories.
Nielsen says the State of the Union was seen by 33.5 million people, which is the lowest number since 2000 and the second-lowest total since 1993, when the agency first started combined measuring for the event.
The combined rating for the 2013 speech was 21.5, which is the lowest in history. President Bill Clinton’s speech in 2000 had a rating of 22.4. The rating number represents the percentage of possible households that have TV sets and could watch the speech.
In other words, nearly 80 percent of American households skipped watching the State of the Union live or on a tape-delayed basis on TV.

Saturday, February 16, 2013

Lobbying and Data Mining

A recent post discussed how lobbyists have borrowed the tools of opposition research from political campaigns.  Politico describes another political tool that has migrated from the campaign world:
A congressman gets an earful from his neighbor after church about a tax bill. A senator suddenly finds old high school classmates calling her about an upcoming vote on a small business bill.
The same social data-mining ability and concept — that voters are more likely to consider new ideas from people they know and trust — that helped power President Barack Obama’s unprecedented field operation is coming to K Street.
More than two dozen trade organizations, local chambers of commerce and advocacy groups have already used the RAP (which stands for Relationships, Advocability and Political capital) Index, a one-of-a-kind piece of advocacy and lobbying software, to help find hidden social connections between lawmakers and their members. The goal? To leverage real-life connections on behalf of organizations — and to put a human face on complicated policy questions.

Contradictory Campaign Messages in Los Angeles

It's one thing to target different messages to different segments of the electorate: candidates often stress pollution when communicating with environmentalists, taxes when talking to businesspeople, and so on. But it's something else to send contradictory messages. At The Los Angeles Times, James Rainey catchesmayoral candidate Jan Perry in a particularly blatant bit of inconsistency
The Los Angeles city councilwoman came out with a bulk-mail pitch Tuesday that shows her side by side with Mayor V. Both are grinning. The headline quotes Villaraigosa, in English and Spanish, saying: "Jan Perry would make a good mayor."
It doesn't say it's an endorsement, though a voter might read it that way. But that would be wrong because a) Villaraigosa has said he does not intend to endorse, at least in the March 5 primary and b) what he actually told NBC4 political reporter Conan Nolan was: "Eric Garcetti would make a good mayor. Jan Perry would make a good mayor. Wendy Greuel would make a good mayor."
Perry's mailer somehow neglected to mention the other two.
But the intrigue only begins there because Perry — who has been positioning herself as the truth teller among a gallery of panderers —sent quite a different message with a mailer a week ago. That one showed rival Wendy Greuel and Villaraigosa arm-in-arm. The headline: "Wendy Greuel: Brought to you by the same people who brought you Antonio Villaraigosa."
...
 The mailer attacking Greuel as a Villaraigosa toady appears to be aimed at conservative voters, many of them in the San Fernando Valley. A whiff of connection to the over-taxing, electric-rate-raising fools at City Hall lands like a stink bomb in those households.
The voters who contacted the Times about the Greuel-Villaraigosa hit piece live in the San Fernando Valley.
The Spanish-English mailer, meanwhile, clearly targeted Latino voters, who played a key role in 2005 in making Villaraigosa the city's first Latino mayor in modern times. Perry appears only too happy to snuggle up next to the mayor in front of that audience.

Hispanic State Population

In its new statistical portrait of the Hispanic population, Pew provides detail on geographic distribution:

Role Models in Poor Neighborhoods

During the fall of 2011, Newt Gingrich said in Des Moines:
Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works. So they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday. They have no habit of staying all day. They have no habit of 'I do this and you give me cash,' unless it's illegal.
Gingrich's remarks, along with his suggestion that poor children have the opportunity to earn money by helping clean schools, drew a great deal of criticism.  Charles Blow of The New York Times called them "cruel" and "mind-numbingly tone-deaf."

Yesterday, in Chicago, President Obama touched on a similar topic:
There are entire neighborhoods where young people, they don’t see an example of somebody succeeding. And for a lot of young boys and young men, in particular, they don’t see an example of fathers or grandfathers, uncles, who are in a position to support families and be held up and respected.
One difference is between "working" and "succeeding." The president would probably say that many people in poor neighborhoods are working -- but in low-wage, dead-end jobs. At the same time, however, he also emphasized role models and the work ethic itself:  
If a child grows up with parents who have work, and have some education, and can be role models, and can teach integrity and responsibility, and discipline and delayed gratification -- all those things give a child the kind of foundation that allows them to say, my future, I can make it what I want.

Friday, February 15, 2013

Oppo and Lobbying

Roll Call notes that lobbyists do opposition research.  The article gives the example of John Hancock, president and CEO of the Strategy Group for Research.
Hancock and his team, for example, approach a congressional hearing the way they would a candidate debate.
After doing as much background digging as possible ahead of time on members and witnesses involved, they’ll dispatch a researcher to conduct real-time fact-checking and then search for ways to discredit opponents. They look for inconsistencies from a witness’s previous statements.
“Are these people credible?” is a constant question Hancock’s team asks.
The oppo researchers then blast their findings to their K Street client’s lobbying or public relations team to get the message out instantly.
Lobbyists who have relied on opposition research say they have tried to discredit lawmakers with congressional financial disclosures when those documents reveal a personal investment in a company that stands to benefit from a particular legislative outcome. Lobbyists typically prefer to quietly share the information with a lawmaker from the other side of the aisle to keep their fingerprints off the story.
Oppo researchers — who often have backgrounds in politics, government and law enforcement that may include the FBI or even the intelligence community — will also scan court documents, public records, campaign finance and lobbying disclosures and reach out to their contacts on Capitol Hill, K Street and in local communities.

Congress and Meteors

A previous post discussed the (remote) possibility of of meteor strike and the relative absence of government plans for a response.  One House member is addressing the topic:
Science, Space, and Technology Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) today released the following statement after reports of an unforeseen meteor exploding in the sky above Russia early this morning, on the same day that a large asteroid is scheduled to pass relatively close to Earth.
Chairman Smith: “Today’s events are a stark reminder of the need to invest in space science. Asteroid 2012 DA14 passed just 17,000 miles from Earth, less than the distance of a round trip from New York to Sydney. And this morning, a much smaller meteorite hit near the Russian city of Chelyabinsk, damaging buildings and injuring hundreds.
“Developing technology and research that enable us to track objects like Asteroid 2012 DA14 is critical to our future. We should continue to invest in systems that identify threatening asteroids and develop contingencies, if needed, to change the course of an asteroid headed toward Earth.

“Fifty years ago, we would have had no way of seeing an asteroid like this coming. Now, thanks to the discoveries NASA has made in its short history, we have known about 2012 DA14 for about a year. As the world leader in space exploration, America has made great progress for mankind. But our work is not done. We should continue to study, research, and explore space to better understand our universe and better protect our planet.”
The Science, Space, and Technology Committee will hold a hearing in the coming weeks to examine ways to better identify and address asteroids that pose a potential threat to Earth.
The key is to send Bruce Willis to blow it up:

Demographics of Social Media

Many posts have dealt with social media, and a boxed feature in the second edition of the textbook looks at social media's political impactA new report from Pew provides some demographic data:
A late 2012 survey by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project shows that young adults are more likely than others to use major social media. At the same time, other groups are interested in different sites and services.
Internet users under 50 are particularly likely to use a social networking site of any kind, and those 18-29 are the most likely of any demographic cohort to do so (83%). Women are more likely than men to be on these sites. Those living in urban settings are also significantly more likely than rural internet users to use social networking.
Read on for a demographic portrait of various social media services.
To view a breakdown of social networking site use by age group, over time, please visit our social networking summary page.

 The landscape of social media users

Meteor

The Russian meteor is a reminder that disaster can come suddenly from the sky. Some questions arise:

Is the US government tracking near-Earth objects (NEOs)?  NASA says yes:
In terms of the discovery efforts for NEOs, NASA's current goal is to discover at least 90% of all NEOs whose diameters are larger than 1 kilometer within 10 years. To meet the NASA goal, the rate with which new objects are discovered will necessarily be largest in the first few years. This is because during the latter years of the 10-year interval, more and more "discoveries" will actually be of objects that have been previously found. Currently, the best estimate of the total population of NEOs larger than one kilometer is about 1000. The progress toward discovering 90% of this population can be monitored under the web page entitled Number of NEOs within the section on Near-Earth Objects.
Do we have a ready-to-go plan for objects that could do catastrophic damage?  Er, not yet.  From a report to NASA's Office of the Chief Technologist:
Despite the lack of a known immediate threat from a near-Earth object (NEO) impact, historical scientific evidence suggests that the potential for a major catastrophe created by an NEO impacting Earth is very real. It is only a matter of when, and humankind must be prepared for it. During the past two decades, various concepts and techniques for mitigating the impact threats from NEOs have been proposed. Unfortunately, many of these previously proposed concepts were impractical and not technically credible. In particular, all non-nuclear techniques, including slow-pull gravity tractors and kinetic-energy impactors, require mission lead times much larger than 10 years, even for a relatively small NEO. However, for the most probable impact threat with a warning time less than 10 years, the use of high-energy nuclear explosives in space becomes inevitable for proper fragmentation and dispersion of an NEO in a collision course with the Earth. However, the existing nuclear subsurface penetrator technology limits the impact velocity to less than 300 m/s because higher impact velocities destroy prematurely the detonation electronic equipment. Thus, an innovative space system architecture utilizing high-energy nuclear explosives must be developed for a worst-case intercept mission resulting in relative closing velocities as high as 5-30 km/s.
What if a near-Earth object actually hits the United States? Is the Federal Emergency Management Agency ready?  A 2001 report by a pair of scientists is not reassuring:

We have little idea about the role that a civilian agency like FEMA might play in the NEO hazard (it has so far given essentially zero consideration to the issue at all). We know even less about the analogous entities in other countries as well as international entities that similarly need to be informed about this issue.



Thursday, February 14, 2013

Cordless Microphones and Interest Groups

The Wall Street Journal reports that regulatory issues can engage an unexpectedly diverse array of interest groups:
Megachurches, Broadway producers and the National Football League have formed an unlikely alliance in a Washington lobbying fight. Their battle cry: Save the wireless microphone.
Regulators are eager to open more of the nation's airwaves to mobile-phone carriers and superfast Wi-Fi technologies. The problem is that some of the space coveted by big technology companies such as Google is already used to amplify the voices of preachers, divas and referees.
...
Reed Hall, the audio director at Houston's Lakewood Church, one of the country's largest, said Sunday churchgoers across the country may be forced to listen to scratchy audio if that happens. Smaller congregations may not be aware their equipment has been outlawed, or may lack the funds to buy new microphones, their supporters say.
"If you're a rural church in the middle of Arkansas, you're not reading every government document that comes out," he said.
At Washington's John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the lack of reserved microphone airspace could ruin the "ability to present the performing arts and the audience's ability to enjoy it," the venue told the FCC in written comments.

The Broadway League, an industry trade group, warned the commission of potential "physical harm to actors," should there be a communications breakdown.



"No One Has a Right to Make Fun of Anyone"

Ars Technica reports on one Georgia lawmaker's peculiar view of the First Amendment:
Infuriated by a critic who photoshopped his head onto the body of a male porn star, a Georgia legislator has proposed making such images illegal. Violators would face a $1,000 fine.
“Everyone has a right to privacy,” Rep. Earnest Smith (D-Augusta) said in an interview with FoxNews.com. “No one has a right to make fun of anyone. It’s not a First Amendment right.”
The legislation would define defamation to include cases where someone "causes an unknowing person wrongfully to be identified as the person in an obscene depiction in such a manner that a reasonable person would conclude that the image depicted was that of the person so wrongfully identified." It specifically includes "the electronic imposing of the facial image of a person onto an obscene depiction."
The Supreme Court has a different take. In Hustler Magazine, Inc. v. Falwell, 485 U.S. 46 (1988) the Court ruled 8-0 that Rev. Jerry Falwell could not collect damages for an equally offensive cartoon.  From the syllabus of the opinion:

In order to protect the free flow of ideas and opinions on matters of public interest and concern, the First and Fourteenth Amendments prohibit public figures and public officials from recovering damages for the tort of intentional infliction of emotional distress by reason of the publication of a caricature such as the ad parody at issue without showing in addition that the publication contains a false statement of fact which was made with "actual malice," i.e., with knowledge that the statement was false or with reckless disregard as to whether or not it was true. The State's interest in protecting public figures from emotional distress is not sufficient to deny First Amendment protection to speech that is patently offensive and is intended to inflict emotional injury when that speech could not reasonably have been interpreted as stating actual facts about the public figure involved. Here, respondent is clearly a "public figure" for First Amendment purposes, and the lower courts' finding that the ad parody was not reasonably believable must be accepted. "Outrageousness" in the area of political and social discourse has an inherent subjectiveness about it which would allow a jury to impose liability on the basis of the jurors' tastes or views, or perhaps on the basis of their dislike of a particular expression, and cannot, consistently with the First Amendment, form a basis for the award of damages for conduct such as that involved here. 

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Citizenship, God, Federalism, and the State of the Union

Previous posts have discussed rhetoric and the State of the UnionIn his address last night, the president emphasized the role of citizenship:
We should follow the example of a police officer named Brian Murphy. When a gunman opened fire on a Sikh temple in Wisconsin and Brian was the first to arrive, he did not consider his own safety. He fought back until help arrived and ordered his fellow officers to protect the safety of the Americans worshiping inside, even as he lay bleeding from 12 bullet wounds. And when asked how he did that, Brian said, "That's just the way we're made."
That's just the way we're made. We may do different jobs and wear different uniforms, and hold different views than the person beside us. But as Americans, we all share the same proud title -- we are citizens. It's a word that doesn't just describe our nationality or legal status. It describes the way we're made. It describes what we believe. It captures the enduring idea that this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another and to future generations, that our rights are wrapped up in the rights of others; and that well into our third century as a nation, it remains the task of us all, as citizens of these United States, to be the authors of the next great chapter of our American story.
Thank you. God bless you, and God bless these United States of America.
The reference to God is a standard American practice, but when Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper once closed a speech by saying "God Bless Canada," a controversy ensued.

Also note the phrase "these United States."  Nearly a hundred years ago, a historian noted that it had already become archaic, since Americans had long adopted the habit of referring to the United States as a single unit.  Nevertheless, it still crops up in political rhetoric from time to time.

Tuesday, February 12, 2013

State of the Union: Historical Perspective


Tonight, the president delivers the annual State of the Union address. At The American Presidency Project Gerhard Peters writes:
A seemingly well-established misconception found even in some academic literature, is that the State of the Union is an orally delivered message presented to a joint session of Congress. With only a few exceptions, this has been true in the modern era (ca. 1933-present, see Neustadt or Greenstein), but beginning with Jefferson's 1st State of the Union (1801) and lasting until Taft's final message (1912), the State of the Union was a written (and often lengthy) report sent to Congress. Although Federalists Washington and Adams had personally addressed the Congress, Jefferson was concerned that the practice of appearing before the representatives of the people was too similar to the British monarch's ritual of addressing the opening of each new Parliament with a list of policy mandates, rather than "recommendations." This changed in 1913. Wilson believed the presidency was more than a impersonal institution; that instead the presidency is dynamic, alive, and personal (see Tulis). In articulating this philosophy, Wilson delivered an oral message to Congress. Health reasons prevented Wilson from addressing Congress in 1919 and 1920, but Harding's two messages (1921 and 1922) and Coolidge's first (1923) were also oral messages. In the strict constructionist style of 19th Century presidents, Coolidge's remaining State of the Unions (1924-28) and all four of Hoover's (1929-32) were written. Franklin D. Roosevelt established the modern tradition of delivering an oral State of the Union beginning with his first in 1934. Exceptions include Truman's 1st (1946) and last (1953), Eisenhower's last (1961), Carter's last (1981), and Nixon's 4th (1973). In addition, Roosevelt's last (1945) and Eisenhower's 4th (1956) were technically written messages although they addressed the American people via radio summarizing their reports. Any research design should recognize these facts.
PBS compares the state of the union in 1913 -- the year in which Wilson revived the oral version -- and 2013:

Texas v. California: Backsides and Heat

A previous post discussed an effort by Texas Governor Rick Perry to draw businesses from CaliforniaAP reports:
Texas Gov. Rick Perry brought his brash pitch for jobs to California on Monday as he sought to lure businesses to his state with the promise of lower taxes and fewer regulations.
Perry's private meetings with business leaders in the San Francisco Bay Area weren't his first effort to tempt companies to leave the Golden State, but this three-day trip has certainly drawn more attention than previous attempts, and the failed Republican presidential candidate welcomed the spotlight.
In an interview with the San Jose Mercury News, he criticized California's regulatory environment, and said Austin, Texas, is poised to become the "next Silicon Valley."
"Twelve years ago, California wasn't looking over its shoulder," he told the newspaper. "They're not looking over their shoulder now — they're looking at our backside."
...
[California Governor Jerry Brown] wondered whether Perry might have a change of heart after arriving.
"A lot of these Texans, they come here, they don't go back," he told reporters. "Who would want to spend their summers in 110-degree heat inside some kind of a fossil-fueled air conditioner? Not a smart way to go."
According to the Farmers' Almanac, Riverside, California, is the third-hottest city in the United States, with an average of 24 days a year with temperatures topping 100 degrees.  Dallas is fourth, with 17 days.

In The Sacramento Bee, Dan Walters writes:

All this gamesmanship aside, however, maybe Brown et al. reacted so defensively because they know that Texas' economy has been booming while California still struggles with a slow recovery from a deep recession.
Yes, some of Texas' prosperity is due to the oil boom. In fact, the California region that most resembles Texas – Bakersfield and environs – is also seeing a surge for the same reasons.
But that merely points up the fact that California has vast potential reserves of shale oil that it is moving very slowly, if at all, to tap.
The differences are more than oil. Texas has a much lower tax structure, including no personal income tax, a much more permissive regulatory climate, and a much lower cost of living, especially housing. That makes it attractive to business of a certain type.
California has its attributes as well, including a much better climate and unmatched natural scenery, as well as first-class research universities and – in and around Silicon Valley at least – a powerful entrepreneurial impulse and access to capital.
The question for California – one that its politicians don't even acknowledge, much less answer – is whether the state's assets outweigh its deficiencies in the global competition for investment capital.
We always assume that today's bust will morph into tomorrow's boom. But Detroit also assumed that it always would be the nation's industrial Goliath.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2013/02/12/5182945/dan-walters-california-vs-texas.html#mi_rss=Dan%20Walters#storylink=cpy

Monday, February 11, 2013

POTUS and the Media

The Washington Post reports that President Obama favors certain media over others:
America’s newspapers have trouble enough these days, what with shrinking ad revenueand straying readers. But the daily print-and-pixel press also hasn’t gotten much love lately from the biggest newsmaker in the business: President Obama.
When Obama does media interviews these days, it’s not with a newspaper. TV gets the bulk of the president’s personal attention, from his frequent appearances on “60 Minutes” to MTV to chitchats with local stations around the country. Magazines — including the New Republic, which recently landed an interview conducted by its owner, Facebook co-founder and former Obama campaign operative Chris Hughes — are a distant second, followed by radio.
Newspapers? Well, Obama may be the least newspaper-friendly president in a generation.
TV interviews enable the president to take his message directly to a wide number of viewers, largely free of the “filter” that a print interview may entail. On TV, after all, the president rarely contends with contradictory comments from opponents or the shades-of-gray context about an issue that newspaper and online stories often offer.
...
Another key advantage of television is that it enables the president to target his message to specific audiences. In his interviews with Univision and Telemundo, for example, he talked about immigration reform, presumably an issue of intense interest to the networks’ Spanish-speaking viewers. He pitched ideas to address climate change in an interview with MTV in October, presumably in a bid to win over younger voters. On “The View,” he has appealed to the program’s large female audience.
The Obama White House has also embraced blogging and social media tools such as Twitter, Facebook and Flickr that bypass the middlemen of the mass media altogether. Obama’s Twitter feed, with nearly 27 million followers, reaches more people than all of the nightly news broadcasts combined and more than the total circulation of the 75 largest daily papers.