Corey Mull's Evil Urges

I agree with John Cole, pt. 1

Just read this excellent post over at Balloon Juice and wanted to add to it. John is, of course, 100% right - that the "right-roots" wing of the Republican Party - the consultants and pundits with fancy conservative Web 2.0 sites - are focused on the wrong thing. The Ruffini/Douthat types are largely expending their energy figuring out how they can organize a new activist bloc around conservative ideas, and how to dress those conservative ideas in new clothes.

This completely misses the point for several reasons, the first of which is that the Republican Party has no ideas! I don't understand how anyone who has seriously followed this election could have possibly missed the fact that John McCain offers very few logical policy proposals (the only one I can think of is his stance on corn subsidies, which is the correct one on the merits) and has instead run on biography alone. That has worked for Republicans before, but not in a time of mounting global crises - now, people want to hear detailed plans and policies that address these global challenges.

Here's the problem: America, by and large, agrees on a few key things: first, that the country needs to move away from oil as an energy source; second, that the war in Iraq is not working; and third, that people should generally have equality of opportunity. The conservative stance on issues related to these broad themes (such as mass transit/sprawl, The Surge, federal student loan programs and health subsidies) are almost all wrong on the merits; indeed, the conservative ideology does not hold a place for the successful implementation of programs related to those broad themes.

This is in stark comparison to what the netroots did for the left in 2002-2006. Netroots bloggers took a Democratic party and literally changed its positions on big-picture issues. Remember the litany of Democratic senators who voted for the Iraq War? Almost all of them have apologized and changed their position. Remember the Blue Dogs in the 1990's who torpedoed health care reform? They're either gone or have changed their tunes. How about the Rubin types who argued that a laissez-faire Wall Street was the best thing for the country? Increasingly gone from the policy-making apparatus of the party. That's not to say that this process is complete - new movements like Better Democrats seek to continually challenge Democratic lawmakers to be true to progressive causes. But note the difference - when it came time for progressive activists to take over a corrupt, moribund Democratic party, they did so not by dressing up the old ideas in new clothes, but by changing the old ideas entirely. No conservative has ever suggested that they do anything of the sort with the Republicans.

Until the larger framework of conservatism can come up with policies that meet people's needs on big themes like the three above, they will continue to flail. And at the risk of concern trolling, I'd suggest that PR/"messaging" flacks like Ruffini shouldn't be the ones to lead American Republicanism into the wilderness - what's needed here are ideas, not messages.

More Crazy

More crazy. Money quote:

Did I mention this man hates me? You and me? Yes he does. Why? Because he can. Yes He Can. Beneath that cool persona is a megalomaniac. Cool? Like Stalin after a purge, emotionally and sexually spent. Like Saddam after a torture session, dozing in his chair with someone's genitals curled in his fist. Like Pol Pot after a petit mal seizure, mumbling a litany of the dead. Cool that way.

At this point, I don't think it's imprudent at all to ask what these people are going to do next Tuesday.

Drink in the Crazy

Here's Mark Levin's magnum opus of crazy at the Corner.

Read it. Read every word. Then sit back and think about how wonderful it's going to be to remove this backwards, tired ideology from power. 

I agree with Obama, pt. 1523

Driving up and down the East Coast through much of the past week I was, out of sheer boredom, exposed to a lot of conservative talk radio. These guys are throwing out anything they can to rally the base - the socialism card, the terrorism card, etc. But one thing they kept on hitting on was Obama's supposed embrace of the Fairness Doctrine, an old FCC regulation that required broadcasters to make an effort to balance political opinion on their stations. Since "balance" is an extremely difficult ideal to achieve, most broadcasters simply shied away from political commentary entirely. The rule was repealed under Reagan, which allowed the multi-billion dollar conservative talk radio industry to begin flourishing.

So it's not a huge surprise that Limbaugh, Hannity and Beck are squealing about the re-imposition of the doctrine - if broadcasters have to make an effort to balance conservative hosts, that's less airtime for them, and it's likely that radio stations would simply give up on supplying political commentary at all.

Intrigued at the efforts to tie Obama to the Fairness Doctrine, I did some good ol' Googling and found this:

"Sen. Obama does not support reimposing the Fairness Doctrine on broadcasters," press secretary Michael Ortiz said in an e-mail to B&C late Wednesday.

"He considers this debate to be a distraction from the conversation we should be having about opening up the airwaves and modern communications to as many diverse viewpoints as possible," Ortiz added. "That is why Sen. Obama supports media-ownership caps, network neutrality, public broadcasting, as well as increasing minority ownership of broadcasting and print outlets."

I agree with this entirely. Think about it this way: how do you "balance" Rush Limbaugh? Will any old Democrat do? How about a conservative Democrat? How do you "balance" Sean Hannity, who tells outright lies on his show? Is it possible to "balance" a lie?

All this talk about balance just reinforces a weird American belief that there are two sides to every issue - when, in fact, there might be six or eight or a hundred.

So the goal should be to let conservative yakkers keep their shows, but open up radio communications platforms to more people a la the internet. I'm way out of my depth when it comes to FCC policy, but it strikes me that the realities of radio broadcasting mean that a very limited number of programs on a limited number of stations are available to a listener at any given point. Incentivizing new stations on new ranges of the radio spectrum should be a goal for any administration to boost the number of viewpoints available through the air.

Plus ca change...

(via)

Holy Shit

Just in case you want to watch this again, and again, and again:

Chyrons and Tickers

I’m staying with my grandparents in Myrtle Beach, SC for the rest of my vacation, which has lent itself to hilarious political conversations as you might expect. But one side effect of this is that Fox News has been on throughout the past few days and not having watched it in a few years, I’m astounded at the sharp ideological turn they’ve taken. I mean they’ve always been a conservative network but the conservatism’s been expressed in things like guest choices, editorial decisions, stuff like that. Now they’re running 100% outrage stories (think Ayers, ACORN, etc.) on their news ticker, and watching the “Journal Editorial Report” has been truly amazing. I mean, you’ve got people who two weeks ago were cheerleading the biggest government intervention in the history of the free market now berating Obama for being a “socialist” for wanting to lower middle-class tax rates.

This kind of stuff is completely beyond parody.

Despicable

Here’s a video of retarded Republican Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann calling for a national media investigation into Congress to determine which members are “anti-American” and which are “pro-American”:

Look at the shit-eating grin on her face throughout the entire interview – she clearly does not believe a damn word she’s saying. My question: why does Chris Matthews and Joe Scarborough and Wolf Blitzer et al continue to allow people on their shows who do not honestly argue their positions?

I mean, think about it: if Michelle Bachmann really thinks that Barack Obama is a terrorist socialist Leftist, don’t you think she’d be running for the hills somewhere? I mean, at this point according to InTrade and 538 and all of the other prognosticators, he has about an 80% chance of winning the election. If I thought that a guy who had an 80% chance of winning the election were a clear and present danger to the United States, I’d either be leaving the country or holing myself up in Idaho with guns and potatoes. Bachmann and Limbaugh and Hannity and Malkin and all of their ilk are doing no such thing.

I hate South Park

I try really hard not to be “that guy” and I almost never am in real life. But here on my blog, I’m gonna be that guy. I hate South Park. I thought it was hilarious in 6th grade when it premiered, and it came on at 10:30 (my bedtime was 10) (yes I still had a bedtime in 6th grade, and actually until I left home) but from the perspective of adulthood I think it’s responsible for a lot of political ignorance and indifference among people my age and a little younger. I mean, the whole ethos of the show is “we make fun of everybody!” regardless of the merits of the particular theme of what’s being discussed. It distilled the progressive movement into “whacko” environmentalism and political correctness movements and while I can’t recall specific conservative caricatures I’m sure they’ve done plenty of those too.

It’s not that I can’t laugh at myself and my beliefs, but it’s all just so tired. Blah blah blah, political correctness Nazis, Bush and Saddam are the same, whatever. Even then, I’ve got no problem with unfunny people but when their nonsense starts to infect actual discourse then it’s a bigger issue. Every time you hear a lower-information young voter talk about how the parties are really all the same or something similar, there’s a little South Park at work there.

Liberal Elite Education Update

So I took this week off from work to visit a few East Coast graduate programs in public policy. With two down and one to go, I think I have a much better picture of what it is I want to accomplish in school. I want to post my thoughts here, mostly for my own benefit.

Yesterday I went to the Institute for Policy Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and met with the Director and  Assistant Director of the program, both of whom were great. I sat in on a class and got a feel for the area, and I was surprised just how student-friendly Baltimore seems. The IPS itself is right up my alley. First semester of your first year is spent, in part, tackling a real policy problem in the city of Baltimore, not a big one by any means, but a nuts and bolts neighborhood issue that affects the lives of actual people. Incredible, and an opportunity I realized one can’t really get outside of an urban-based program like this.

The downside? Tuition (yes, just tuition) is almost $38,000 a year. Quick rent calculations suggest I’d spend another $15k at least just to house myself in Baltimore. 95% of students receive some kind of scholarship, but still. God damn.

Then today I took the train to Philadelphia to visit the University of Pennsylvania and the Fels Institute of Government. The ride was awesome – trains go so much faster north of DC! And to be honest, I fell in love with Penn (and Philadelphia) and if I get into Fels, I’m going. Tuition is much more reasonable at $26,000, although I’m not sure how cost of living in Philadelphia and Baltimore stack up against each other; I might be paying the same amount either way. I met with the admissions director of the program, as well as two professors, took a campus tour, and attended a class in the politics of housing. According to the professors, the program’s links with the local government aren’t as strong as Hopkins’ seems to be, although they’ve recently elected a reformist mayor and Penn alum and those ties seem to be improving.

While I was at Penn I was actually mad at myself for not having applied myself just a little bit better in high school, as well as not bothering to seek out schools like this when I was eighteen. Lesson learned, I guess.

Anyway, on the way back home I was doing cost-benefit analyses on grad school. By any measure, I think, Hopkins has to be out. I mean, I loved it, and the opportunities for working directly with policymakers in Baltimore are unparalleled. I mean, this is the home of The Wire, and a lot of the researchers are working on problems directly out of that show. And I think I’d like living in Homewood or Charles Village or wherever Hopkins students live. But I don’t want to leave school with $100,000 in debt.

Penn is about $25,000 cheaper over the two-year program, and even though it doesn’t fit me as exactly as the Hopkins program does, it’s close enough and it seems like there are ample opportunities to work on real issues in Philadelphia although maybe they aren’t as integrated into the program.