Month: April 2010

I don’t know if Arkansas Senator Blanche Lincoln’s primary challenger, Bill Halter, is a progressive, but I have to assume he at least wouldn’t undercut his own caucus in the Senate as frequently and blatantly as Senator Lincoln has done over the past year and a half. He may not win in November, but it sounds like he stands a helluva better chance than Lincoln herself (from Mike Madden at Salon):

Halter, who’s now the Arkansas lieutenant governor, says he’s running to help turn around the economy and create jobs, and to speak for the people, not for the special interests in Washington. And Lincoln, naturally, isn’t exactly throwing in the towel. But it’s not hard to see why Halter thought he had a chance in the first place. For months, the polls back home have brought Lincoln nothing but bad news; only a few incumbents have ever dug themselves out of holes like the one she’s in. In the month since Halter finally got into the race, the trouble has kept mounting for Lincoln. A survey out Thursday showed him doing slightly better than the incumbent against possible Republican nominees. The same day, Halter’s campaign announced he raised about $2 million this quarter — even though he’s only been running since March 1. Lincoln, working for the full three months, raised about half that.

“As I looked at it — and I think this is clear from the public polling — the incumbent was and is going to have a very hard time getting reelected,” Halter says. “People from all parts of Arkansas were literally calling up or stopping me on the street, and saying, ‘Look, we want you to do this, and we’re with you.'”

Let’s refresh our recollection of Blanche Lincoln’s obstructionism on health care reform, shall we? Obstruction that nearly killed any bill, much less a bill that might have provided us a public option:

In July 2009, she offered her support for Obama’s healthcare plan and his inclusion of a public insurance option. “Individuals should be able to choose from a range of quality health insurance plans,” she wrote in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. “Options should include private plans as well as a quality, affordable public plan or non-profit plan that can accomplish the same goals as those of a public plan.”

Yet two months later, after the public option came under fire from insurance companies and Tea Partiers, Lincoln changed her tune. “I would not support a solely government-funded public option,” she said on September 1 in Little Rock. “We can’t afford that.” She vowed to filibuster any healthcare bill that included the public option she once supported, even though 56 percent of Arkansans backed the provision.

In December, she supported the Senate’s healthcare reform legislation–which did not include a public option, in part due to opposition from the likes of Lincoln. Her first re-election ad this year cited her vote “against the public option healthcare plan,” along with a number of other Obama initiatives. “I don’t answer to my party,” she said. “I answer to Arkansas.” […]

In March 2010, Lincoln hailed the efforts of House Democrats to pass the Senate’s healthcare bill, noting its “significant benefits” for Arkansas. But she then opposed the efforts of Senate Democrats to pass the House’s fixes to the bill through reconciliation–the very process that enabled Democrats to agree on a final bill.

Well, Arkansas Democrats don’t like how she screwed around with health care and helped destroy any chance of a public option. She played the GOP’s game and the insurance industry’s game hoping to win over enough conservative votes this Fall to keep her seat. Instead she lost — lost her Democratic base, lost the faith of ordinary people because her mealy mouthed approach to going Republican lite played into the GOP’s scare tactics and lost the trust of political professionals who she needs to run an effective campaign.

“I’m one of the ones who have been disappointed with how far right Blanche has been over the years,” says Larry Crane, the former chairman of the Pulaski County Democratic Party, who resigned a few weeks ago to run for county clerk. “I think that she probably is where she is for self-preservation, and I think for many of us, she has misjudged where we would like her to be.”

She ought to end her bid for another term, but politicians rarely see the handwriting on the wall. I say let’s give Halter a shot. He cannot be worse. He sounds like he is a more popular political figure state wide right now and is likely the best candidate to run against the Republican. Even if he loses he sets himself up for another run in six years, or a chance at Governor or a Congressional seat.

I support his candidacy and I hope you will also. Here’s his Act Blue financing page where you can contribute to his campaign should you be so inclined. I have.

Roughly speaking, I think we have three main political problems in this country: 1) that too many people with a megaphone talk crap; 2) that too many citizens believe crap; and 3) the ratio of crap to non-crap in the public dialogue is much too high.

These three political problems can be roughly reformulated as follows: 1) our news media are broken; 2) civic education is broken; 3) political leadership is broken.

I’m not going to bother to support these contentions right now, but instead throw out unsupported assertions as to why each is true. Some of these assertions are commonplace and easily supported. Some are probably true, but require more support than is in the public dialogue right now. And some I’m just throwing out for the hell of it. These three problems are in no way discrete: they are all thoroughly interpenetrated. The lists are not meant to be exhaustive: there is lots more wrong.

Today, we deal with a broken media, the megaphones for the squawk that is our civic dialogue.

1) Too many people with a megaphone talk crap; our news media are broken:
a. Unfit people are given access to the media – The ratio of Pat Robertsons, Tea Baggers, bloviating reporters, movie stars, sports stars and just plain morons who get air time/column inches etc. is way too high. Who cares what these people think about political issues? They know little, and have no standing to offer an intelligent opinion beyond any person on the street.
b. Fit people are denied access to the media – The ratio of academics and genuine subject-matter experts who get air time/column inches etc. is way too low. Moreover, the range of the few who do get exposure is way too narrow. These people have real expertise in a given subject, from air pollution to dissident movements in Islam. Why not tap into opinions which have some basis in study and experience?
c. Reporters are on screen much too much – Does this sound strange to you? Then you are too young to remember that even famous reporters in the early days of television like Edward R. Murrow and Lowell Thomas were almost always disembodied voices from off-screen. Their voices spoke while video ran of the story they were reporting. This meant a number of things: 1) they were valued for their reporting; 2) they didn’t have to be beautiful. Because in our society, perceptions of beauty and youth correspond tightly, this virtually guarantees a pool of reporters who are largely inexperienced. By limiting television reporters to the videogenic, television eliminates a huge number of people who would be good reporters, and includes a high number of good-looking potential morons and naifs.
d. Reporting is now a profession – Again, if this sounds strange to you, you are young. Reporting used to be a craft – verbal carpentry, if you will: finding out who, what, why, when, where and how, getting it double-sourced and writing it in coherent English to a deadline. This work was done mostly by high-school graduates (of course, in those days, most white high school graduates could do this). The work paid little and only people who loved it did it, without much prospect of reward. Now, journalists have to major in journalism in college. College and journalism school are very expensive these days. Although capstone pay is high, starting pay is very low, so only young people who can be supported by their parents for a few more years after college go into the profession. Guess why journalists are no longer “paladins of the people” but somehow all seem to gravitate toward the opinions of the rich and the wanna-be rich? Professionalization also means that young reporters are hoping for a career, which makes them mostly gutless.
e. Reporters are ignorant of the background to their stories – As the recent stompings of Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper on Celebrity Jeopardy indicate, generalists who are supposed to report on a range facts simply don’t know enough of them. Because they spend lots of time speaking with ill-informed people and not enough time with well-informed ones (see items a. and b.), reporters are under a constant barrage of lies, spin and opinion masquerading as fact. Because they do not know enough of the facts themselves, everything in the civic dialogue just appears to be in contention. In many cases, they are too damned ignorant to know crap from fact. It doesn’t help that they are too scared for their jobs to call out crap, and too young to have lived through things being discussed and therefore have a suspicion that they are hearing crap, but in many instances, they just don’t know crap from fact. Because all truth is merely a matter of opinion – we are quickly abandoning any practice of the Anglo-American empirical tradition – they are not going to bothered trying to sort out crap from fact.
f. Journalists run in herds, because they are scared, lazy and ignorant.
g. Journalism is the most arrogant profession, having long since surpassed medicine. Doctors will admit that they were wrong occasionally. Try to get a journalist to do it sometime. The rest of us just don’t understand how hard their jobs are, how much expertise they have, how much preparation they do. Baloney.
h. And of course, journalism has been corporatized. Career journalists know who their masters are.

David Corn points out that when it comes to making gains in the upcoming midterm elections, the GOP may be their own worst enemy. After all, the party is a mess, Michael Steele is a joke, they have no positive agenda, and scandals keep piling up. Not only that, but the Tea Partiers are going to continue to cause havoc and bring unwanted publicity to the conservative movement. But, Democrats cannot rely on a self-inflicted implosion. They need to diagnose the mood of the country accurately, and make smart moves to win the national debate.

It seems pretty obvious that there is a widespread perception out there that the government is doing too much and is too far in debt. And that perception is the biggest problem that the Democrats face. If the government takes more action to stimulate job creation, it will cost money and feed both negative narratives. Passing more sweeping legislation on immigration or climate will feed into the perception that the government has its tentacles everywhere. The more the people want the government to slow down, the more they’ll be impervious to the message that a Republican congress will just create gridlock and nothing will get done. But that’s the message the Democrats want to make.

Remember when Gingrich shut down the government and impeached a popular president for lying about his infidelity? Well, that was back when the Republican Party was somewhat reasonable. Look at them now [insert shot of foaming-mad tea party ralliers]. Do you think Obama will be more successful in turning the economy around with these loons nipping at his heels?

One way to combat this national mood is to time some very popular legislation for the fall that is crafted in such a way that it will guarantee a Republican filibuster. What we want is for the public to have the perception that the Republicans are standing in the way of needed reforms and that the last thing we need is to give them even more power to block legislation. To do this, the Democrats need a sacrificial lamb…something they don’t mind seeing go down to a filibuster. That’s the problem with using the most obvious bill…the financial services bill. Do we really want to fail to address the too-big-to-fail problem? This is especially hard to contemplate because, crafted more to the GOP’s liking, the financial sector reforms could become a major bipartisan victory of the type Obama has been seeking since he came into office. On the other hand, a bill that is to the GOP’s liking is not going to truly fix the problem. Decisions, decisions…

I hope smarter people than me are working on the legislative calendar.

Well, we added some jobs last month for a change. Payroll employment increased by 162,000. That’s the good news. The bad news is that a lot of those jobs were for the Census and for temporary work. The unemployment rate is unchanged, and information technology and financial sector jobs continue to disappear.

We’re basically treading water, and that’s not good enough to improve the mood of the country. Still, it’s refreshing to get a positive jobs number. We need to keep piling those up, month after month. How’s the economy where you’re living?

Welcome to Friday Foto Flogging, a place to share your photos and photography news. We were inspired by the folks at European Tribune who post a regular Friday Photoblog series to try the same on this side of the virtual Atlantic. We also thought foto folks would enjoy seeing some other websites so each week we’ll introduce a different photo website.

This Week’s Theme: Beginnings and Endings.

Website(s) of the Week: Hunting for the Oldest Living Things in the World.

AndiF Beginnings and Endings

	New Moss, Old Leaf Click image for larger version
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	Migrating Cranes Click image for larger version

olivia Beginnings and Endings

	Beginning: bud Click image for larger version
	Beginning and Ending: circular path in the sunken garden Click image for larger version
	Ending: sunset on the beach

Next Week’s Theme: Power.

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What is it?

DIY

It’s a long holiday weekend, starting now…

If you haven’t ever heard Harriet Wheeler sing, well, now’s your chance:

What are you going to do this weekend?

I wouldn’t hire this guy to defend me, because he makes pathetic arguments. But I am just going to focus one one of them. He cites Dick Morris on the meaning of triangulation:

“The essence of triangulation is to use your party’s solutions to solve the other side’s problems. Use your tools to fix their car.” Clinton, Morris shows, adopted the longstanding conservative goal of welfare reform as a top item on the Democratic agenda, but developed progressive policies, including higher funding for child care and stronger financial support for working families, to pursue that goal.

Armando perfectly makes my point about what triangulation is, and what it is not. For Morris, it is about solving your opponent’s problems. In other words, it’s about adopting their agenda. And that is precisely the distinction I am making between ordinary horse-trading in the service of your own agenda and triangulation. It’s there, right from the right-wing Clinton analyst’s mouth.

I will add one additional gripe with Armando’s post. He claims that the Democrats’ fortunes improved as a result of triangulation (or, at least, he strongly implies that). Yes, he acknowledges that Clinton’s second term had a robust economy, but he seems to downplay that. But, I’d argue that Clinton left office with a very weak party in his wake. I’d argue that the liberal base of the party had atrophied to a dangerous degree and that they were demoralized. Don’t forget how narrowly Gore defeated Bill Bradley in New Hampshire, or that Gore selected Lieberman as his running-mate. Don’t forget that the country nearly elected an idiot instead of Gore, who should have won in a walk even with the burden of Monica Lewinsky hanging around his neck. I thought it was almost an article of faith among progressives that Howard Dean revived a slumbering progressive base in this country that had been put to sleep by DLC bullshit.

I liked Matt Miller’s column, but I am getting a little concerned about the triumphalism I’m seeing on the left. The polls are still extraordinarily troublesome. It’s true that the Republicans are stumbling in the dark and that they have no cohesive message or ideas for tackling the problems the country is facing. And it’s true that, in time, we’ll look back at the passage of health care reform as the requiem of the Reagan Revolution’s dream. But, we have short-term shit to worry about. If the country is indeed about to vote-in a bunch of crazy movement Republicans, then we’re headed for a world of gridlock and hurt. People need to wake up.

For the purposes of this conversation, I am going to posit that triangulation is a pejorative. It is a political act that is contrary to the interests of principled people on either the right or the left. Its use puts the immediate needs of the president over the needs of his party. It weakens his party and harms the issues for which his party stands. It’s possible to argue otherwise. Some might see triangulation as a savvy strategy that is appropriate in certain circumstances (e.g., a Democratic president faced with a Gingrich Congress). But, I believe we are correct to condemn triangulation, provided we are careful to be sure we know what we mean by the term. And we are not careful.

Triangulation was first self-consciously practiced on the advice of Dick Morris as a way for Clinton to recover from the disastrous 1994 midterms and win reelection in 1996. It succeeded in its primary goal, although alternative strategies may have worked just as well, or better. Clinton embraced deregulation and balanced budgets and most notoriously declared that the ‘era of big government is over’ in his 1996 State of the Union speech. He also passed a Welfare Reform Bill that was so draconian to legal aliens that it caused several resignations from his administration. But we should be careful to make some distinctions. Bill Clinton came out of the Democratic Leadership Council, and his campaign for president embraced several ‘moderate’ positions, including free trade and welfare reform. The campaign on Ross Perot in 1992 had been so focused on balanced budgets that it forced Clinton to pay at least lip service to the issue. In many ways, Clinton’s campaign had been an effort to recast the Democratic Party as a new less liberally orthodox more business-friendly party. So, it’s easy to fall into the trap of considering Clinton’s entire philosophy a form of triangulation. But, aside from the passage of NAFTA, Clinton didn’t govern that way during his first two years in office. He pursued a employer-mandated form of universal health care reform and he attempted to keep his promise to the gay community that they could serve in the military. He passed sweeping gun control laws and the Family Leave Act. He hiked taxes to help balance the budget and pay for an expanded safety net. And he, and his party, got drubbed in the midterms. It was only then that Clinton really embraced a self-conscious strategy of triangulation.

He no longer had much of an agenda for himself, but instead decided to focus on passing items on the Republicans agenda. But he wanted to do it in a way that he could take all the credit for it. This was in part a nod to political reality. Gingrich’s Congress wasn’t going to pass anything on his agenda anyway, and he needed to show that he was still effective. But the cost was very high for liberal causes because Clinton was embracing one Republican idea after another and calling it his own. He even embraced the idea that Big Government is bad and declared it over. This from a man who had just tried to enact universal health care!

So, I think we can see what triangulation is, but we’re not yet clear on what it is not. At all times, in any era, a president must deal with the Congress he has and not the Congress he might wish to have. Except in very rare cases (FDR and LBJ) no president has the kind of majorities needed to just impose their will. It is therefore the norm that a president must compromise with the opposing party. This is not triangulation, but simple legislating. For most of the last century, there was considerable ideological overlap between the two parties, meaning that presidents could cobble together majorities on a regional or ideological basis rather than a strictly partisan one. Moreover, the filibuster was rarely used. Neither of those things are true today. It is now both harder to attract votes from across the aisle and tougher to pass legislation because of the new 60 vote requirement for nearly all proposals. As a result, even with 59 members in the Senate Democratic Caucus, Obama cannot pass anything without getting some Republican support. But that does not mean he has to triangulate. He can still pursue his agenda, which includes climate/energy reform, immigration reform, financial services reform, and an overhaul of the No Child Left Behind. If he were to embrace triangulation, he would be adopting a Republican agenda and trying to call it his own.

Making compromises to get his agenda passed is what all presidents have to do (with the limited exception of FDR and LBJ), and should not be considered in a pejorative light. Nor should rhetoric that spins those compromises in the best light be considered pejoratively. A politician, like a lawyer, should be expected to put the best light on a set of facts.

This can be taken too far, as in the case of declaring the era of big government over, but on less fundamental issues it is harmless.

So, in conclusion, making compromises with the opposing party should not be considered ‘triangulation’ in any kind of pejorative sense. Adopting your opponents’ agenda and dropping your own, while praising things which, until yesterday, your party opposed? That’s triangulation. And it will predictably do real damage to the party of any president who pursues it.

Crossposted from the Worldwatch Institute’s Nourishing the Planet.

“We’ve got hundreds of local foods, almost 600 that we’ve categorized through our research,” said Kristof Nordin in a January interview with Nourishing the Planet project co-Director, Danielle Nierenberg, at the permaculture project he runs in Malawi with his wife, Stacia (see also: Malawi’s Real Miracle). “But we are starving because we are only planting one crop: maize, which came originally from America.”

Many efforts to combat hunger and drought across Africa emphasize boosting yields of staple crops such as maize, wheat, cassava, and rice, which can provide much-needed calories as well as income to millions of farmers. These staples, however, lack many essential micronutrients, including Vitamin A, thiamin, and niacin. That is why many communities rely on indigenous vegetables such as amaranth, dika, moringa, and baobab to add both nutrients and taste to staple foods. These vegetables are rich in vitamins and nutrients and are often naturally resistant to local pests and climatic fluctuations, making them an important tool in the fight against hunger and poverty.

“We are not saying stop growing maize, we grow maize as well,” continued Kristof. “But we try to show people how it can be part of an integrated system, how that integrated agriculture can be part of a balanced diet.”

Greater variety can lead to a better tasting diet, too, according to Dr. Abdou Tenkouano, the World Vegetable Center‘s Regional Director for Africa in Arusha, Tanzania. “None of the staple crops would be palatable without vegetables,” he told Danielle when she visited the center last November. For almost 20 years now, the Center–part of the Asian Vegetable Research and Development Center based in Taiwan–has been working in Africa to breed cultivars that best suit farmers’ needs (see Listening to Farmers).

In addition to providing the vitamins and nutrients needed for a complete diet, indigenous vegetables are more affordable and accessible to farmers who might otherwise be forced to pay for costly imported staple crops and the inputs they require. According to the Center’s website, vegetable production also generates more income on and off the farm than most other agricultural enterprises.

Indigenous vegetables help to preserve culture and traditions as well. “If a person doesn’t know how to cook or prepare food, they don’t know how to eat,” said Edward Mukiibi, a coordinator with the Developing Innovations in School Cultivation (DISC) project in Uganda, in a December interview with Danielle. The DISC project, founded by Edward and Roger Serunjogi in 2006, hopes to instill greater environmental awareness and appreciation for food, nutrition, and gastronomy by establishing school gardens at 15 preschool, day, and boarding schools. By focusing on indigenous vegetables, the project not only preserves Ugandan culture, but also shows kids how agriculture can be a way to improve diets, livelihoods, and food security (see How to Keep Kids Down on the Farm).

Sylvia Banda is another cultural pioneer. She founded Sylva Professional Catering Services in 1986 in part because she was tired of seeing Western-style foods preferred over traditional Zambian fare like chibwabwa (pumpkin leaves) and impwa (dry garden eggplant) (see Winrock International and Sylva Professional Catering Services Ltd).What started as a catering business grew into a restaurant, cooking school, and hotel, with training programs that teach farmers in Zambia, mostly women, to grow indigenous crops. Sylva’s company purchases the surplus crops from the farmers it trains and uses them in the traditional meals prepared by her facilities, improving local livelihoods and keeping the profits in the local economy.

“When I first met some of these families, their children were at home while school was in session,” Sylvia said during a Community Food Enterprise Panel and Discussion hosted by Winrock International in Washington, D.C., in January. “They told me that they didn’t have money to pay for education. But after becoming suppliers for my business, the families can afford to send their children to school and even to buy things like furniture for their houses.”

Women who grow vegetable gardens in Kibera slum outside of Nairobi, Kenya, were among the best prepared for the country’s 2007 food crisis, despite being some of the poorest members of society. Their gardens provided family meals at a time when no other food was coming into the city. With food prices on the rise in Africa and the impacts of climate change becoming more significant, home gardens raising indigenous vegetables that are resistant to extreme weather and are rich in vitamins and nutrients have become even more important (see Vertical Farms: Finding Creative Ways to Grow Food in Kibera).

As these examples illustrate, most parts of sub-Saharan Africa “have everything they need right here,” according to Kristof.

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