Month: November 2013

For people who like to portray themselves as Constitutional scholars and the modern executors of the Founders' intellectual estate, Republicans sure play fast and loose with the sacred text when it suits their needs.

Here is the briefest possible explanation for why the Senate changed the filibuster rule we all remember learning about in junior high civics class. Chances are most people who know what it is recognize it because the name sounds vaguely hilarious.

Yes, with three years remaining in Obama's second term the Senate Republicans have already nearly tripled the previous record for filibusters against the party in control of the White House. Worse, they have abandoned even the thinnest pretext of principle behind their use of the filibuster to block presidential appointments. They no longer bother mounting long, windy, insincere speeches about how the president's appointees are just Too Liberal and Activist Judges. No, for the past few years their approach has been essentially, "We're going to block all of these because we don't like you."

Typical Republican approach: break government, declare that government is broken, campaign against government. Repeat as long as rubes will buy it.

That a rule change was necessary is beyond obvious at this point. Yes, at some point in the future it will be used against Senate Democrats when they find themselves in the minority; that is something they will have to live with. This made sense in both the long and the short term. I'm sick to death of hearing about how the Senate is thinking about changing the rules. They've been talking about it for a decade. Shut up and do it already. It was starting to feel like Duke Nukem II, for christ's sake.

Now that it's over and done with, I do have a few lingering issues for our Constitution worshiping brethren on the right.

They're very big on upholding the intent of the Founders, right? Right? Of course they are. Just ask them.

First, the word "filibuster" appears nowhere in the Constitution. It's a simple Senate rule. It is to the Senate what the phrase "under God" is to the Pledge of Allegiance – inserted after the fact but misrepresented as part of the original intent. Anyone who brings up the Constitution as a reason why the rule cannot be changed is the purest breed of dolt (Art.

I, Sec. 5: "Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings…")

Second, does not the Constitution give the Senate the duty to ensure the operation of the government by facilitating the presidents' appointment of judges, ambassadors, and other officials? Sure, we could quarrel over the meaning of "advice and consent" here, but for people who claim to rely on the intent of the Founders it is abundantly, sparklingly crystal clear that the authors of the document had zero intention of the Senate minority using rules to prevent the body from approving appointees for partisan political reasons. Find some archival evidence that Madison said, "Well if you don't like the president, it's cool to abdicate the constitutional responsibilities of the Senate." I'll wait.

Third, it strikes me as hilarious that some Republicans appear to believe the party will score political points with this issue. The very idea that Americans even know what Senate rules are, let alone care that they have been changed, is laughable. As someone who studies public opinion, I've had this conversation a few times with folks who study Congress – you can't poll people on things like Senate rules and congressional procedure because people have zero idea what any of those things are. I'd assume, thanks to Hollywood, that the filibuster is somewhat more recognizable, but in an electorate in which 1/3 of eligible voters don't know which party controls Congress it's highly doubtful that the GOP will be able to build on…what, pro-filibuster sentiment? Do they think that is a thing that exists?

The simple reality of our system is that at some point you have to stop fighting election results. At some point the minority party has to accept that they lost and that they will have to do some things they don't like because the other party is in control.
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Except that now the GOP can't accept that and can't stop fighting, ever, because the Tea Party is looming over them like a cloud – a crazy, illiterate cloud – ready to primary challenge any member who fails to refuse absolutely to perform any part of his/her responsibilities that abets Obama in any way. In that light, we could argue that eliminating the filibuster did Senate Republicans a favor, as they no longer have to go through the futile kabuki theater of mounting a filibuster against every single act the Senate undertakes. That must be tiring, after all.

Recently I saw this on Facebox:

The comment reminds me an awful lot of one of the most common problems I encounter while teaching. You see, this person has done her research. Unfortunately research is not helpful if everything you read is bullshit. That's the beating heart of the anti-vaccination movement, for example: a person can do endless research on the subject online and find numerous sources of antivax information.
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I mean, none of it is accurate, but it's certainly plentiful.

About once per semester, depending on what I'm teaching, I will encounter this with a student. He will write a paper and cite numerous sources throughout as students are taught to do in a research paper. But the sources will be, for lack of a better term, bullshit. Tumblrs. Blogs. Conspiracy theory websites. Essentially, a bunch of garbage that falls into the category of Unreliable.

Now I have to do a mini-lecture on Good Sources vs. Bad Sources. The problem is that younger people who have grown up with the internet perceive The Internet, or perhaps Google, as a source. If one views Google as a single source, than any link found on Google is as good as any other.
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I try to explain that reliable sources of information for academic purposes are things like major media outlets, peer-reviewed journals, government records, and so on. Certainly all of those can and do provide inaccurate information at times. But if we're playing the percentages, your odds are a lot better with the Bureau of Labor Statistics or Science than with the Vaccine Facts tumblr or the Strip Mall Holistic Healing Wellness Center's website.

What I do not understand about this is that Americans of all ages express a tremendous amount of skepticism toward the media, the government, corporations, interest groups, and anything else considered Official. Yet when reading some anonymous mommyblogger's tale of how she cured her son's autism with quinoa cookies, an appreciable percentage of the public is willing to internalize this information completely unskeptically. The librul media and the government and "scientists" are lying to us wholesale, but this random asshole on a message board speaks the unvarnished truth. Even the fact that such dubious sources of information often have a clear ideological or financial motive – they reveal the rapacious greed of Big Pharma and then immediately try to sell you some unregulated Homeobullshit product – it's not enough to tip some of us off that it might be a scam.

I understand, but I don't understand. The skepticism of our scientific, media, and political institutions makes perfect sense. That none of that skepticism extends to random, qualification-free people talking out of their asses on the internet does not make sense. Perhaps this is an area where the rottenness of cable TV news and the decline of print media are causing serious problems. Perhaps Fox News and the like look so utterly ridiculous and amateurish that people raised on a diet of that product honestly can't tell what distinguishes it from some half-decent looking Tumblrs. Maybe one news website looks as good as any other, whereas if one sees a physical copy of the New York Post next to the New York Times the differences between the two are much clearer. I don't suppose I will discover the cause by ruminating on these questions, but I do know that an uncomfortably large number of people claiming to have "done their research" have done something that makes them feel like they are well informed when they have actually filled their heads with nonsense.

I watch 24 hour cable news networks solely for comedy value at this point. They serve no other purpose. Fox News is and forever shall be the king of journalism as unintentional comedy, of course. Their daily exercise in self-parody must be seen to be believed. However, over the past year CNN has been nearly as fun to watch. The network's disintegration – economic, professional, and psychological – has been a thing of absolute wonder to watch. They managed to finish fifth in the ratings this month, behind Fox, MSNBC (not exactly a ratings juggernaut itself over the years), its sister network HLN, and, somehow, CNBC. Every new ratings stumble sends them into greater paroxysms of desperation. And thus the viewers will never come back; we all know that desperation is a big turn-off, and CNN has it in spades.

Its mission to re-brand itself as the bland, centrist, Beltway consensus alternative to Fox and MSNBC at the outset of the 2012 election succeeded – CNN is now an inoffensive dish of lukewarm water between the fire and ice of its more partisan rivals.
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This hasn't helped the ratings one bit, as it turns out that no one wants to watch mushy nonsense delivered with no position or perspective. It appears that their current mission, perhaps inspired by their ratings boost from saturation coverage of the Haitian earthquake in 2010, is to brand themselves the Breaking News network.
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If it's sudden and sensational and absolutely needs to be covered to death for weeks on end, CNN is your huckleberry.

This emphasis on sensational breaking news stories, and the concomitant need to Be First in breaking all the Big News, played out to hilarious effect during the Boston marathon bombing. The network provided one of the most jaw-droppingly awful spectacles in the history of journalism as producers argued, I assume, over ordering Wolf Blitzer to commit seppuku live via satellite. This failure only motivated the network to redouble its efforts. Whenever disaster strikes – particularly natural disasters and school shootings – they beat the drum louder and longer than any of their competitors.

And that is why all of their coverage, such as the recent hysterical coverage of the Philippine typhoon, feels so goddamn tacky = they seem like they're excited by disasters. To see this coverage is to wonder if network policy forbids filming their field reporters from the waist down so as not to reveal their massive hard-ons. It is plausible to argue that the news media play an important role in the early stages of disasters. But CNN's coverage is more Debris Porn than Information Clearinghouse. No sooner did the storm strike than Anderson Cooper was parachuted in to show us rubble, rubble, more rubble, and some corpses. They're giving this story the full court press not because it is important to their American audience but to exploit the suffering for the kinds of lurid images of death and destruction that they hope will capture viewers' attention for a few days. They will argue that they are doing it to help the victims, perhaps not even aware that whatever line exists between public-minded journalism and exploitation has been obliterated.
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Unfortunately for CNN, too many of us recognize the difference between voyeurism / disaster porn and a sincere concern for the well being of the victims. Hint: The blaring DEATH TOLL counter on the screen kinda gives it away.