Thad Kousser at the Los Angeles Times urges action on the promising results of study he helped undertake in Want to increase voter turnout? Here's how:
Campaigns generally focus their efforts on those they have reason to expect will vote. And since every Californian's turnout history is a matter of public record, it's easy for strategists to target frequent voters in their mobilization efforts. [...]
But this can create a vicious cycle, in which people who missed elections in the past receive less attention from campaigns, which in turn makes them more likely to skip elections going forward.
Supported by a grant from the Hewlett Foundation's Madison Initiative, [Seth] Hill and I used the statewide voter file to identify registered voters who skipped primary elections, and then we randomly selected 150,000 of them to target in this year's June's primary. Partnering with Common Cause, a nonpartisan political reform group, we sent out targeted letters that provided information about the election and urged people to vote.
The letters worked as well as similar letters in past experiments that targeted more frequent voters. Our letters had the same mobilizing impact on independent voters as they did on members of political parties. And, in an especially encouraging finding, the letters spurred the greatest increase in turnout among voters who had participated in the fewest November elections in the previous four years.
Michelle Goldberg at
The Nation writes
The Women’s Equality Party Is a Joke:
According to the website of New York’s nascent Women’s Equality Party, the organization was “[i]nspired by the spirit of Seneca Falls and those who came before us” and “brings together the strength of New York’s women leaders to help elect candidates who support the issues that matter most to us.” In actual fact, however, the Women’s Equality Party, which was founded by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo in July, seems inspired by nothing so much as his desire to undermine the progressive Working Families Party. Cuomo’s attempt to hijack feminism for his own petty ends is such a craven move it could have been dreamed up by the scriptwriters at VEEP. It would be bleakly funny if it didn’t pose an actual danger to an organization that has always fought for New York’s women.
More excerpts from the pundits can be found below the spilled orange soda stain.
Paul Krugman at The New York Times should have gotten the headline writer to add "idiocy" for an added alliteration in his op-ed piece, Ideology and Investment:
America used to be a country that built for the future. Sometimes the government built directly: Public projects, from the Erie Canal to the Interstate Highway System, provided the backbone for economic growth. Sometimes it provided incentives to the private sector, like land grants to spur railroad construction. Either way, there was broad support for spending that would make us richer.
But nowadays we simply won’t invest, even when the need is obvious and the timing couldn’t be better. And don’t tell me that the problem is “political dysfunction” or some other weasel phrase that diffuses the blame. Our inability to invest doesn’t reflect something wrong with “Washington”; it reflects the destructive ideology that has taken over the Republican Party.
Nick Schou, the editor of the alternative California publication
OC Weekly, writes at
Al Jazeera about
The decline of journalism from Watergate to 'Dark Alliance':
The fragility of the whole investigation into the [Watergate] break-in and the subsequent cover-up shows how much the veracity of the news depends on the guts not only of reporters but also of their editors and publishers. “Woodstein,” as Woodward and Bernstein were jokingly known, never would have nailed Nixon had they not had the support of an editor with an iron backbone willing to stand up to the White House, which used both anonymous leaks and on-the-record denials to try to kill the story.
That editor, Bradlee, passed away on Oct. 21 at the age of 93, which is too bad, because America needs the type of journalistic guts he embodied, now more than ever.
A case in point involves another movie now in theaters, “Kill the Messenger,” which is based in part on my 2006 biography of investigative reporter Gary Webb. In 1996, Webb unloaded a three-part series for The San Jose Mercury-News alleging that the Central Intelligence Agency helped spark America’s crack cocaine epidemic by enabling drug traffickers tied to the Nicaraguan Contras to ship into the country and use the proceeds to fund their insurgency against the Sandinista government. Published on the Mercury-News’ website, thereby making it available to all, the series, “Dark Alliance,” became one of the first viral news pieces of the Internet era. As with Watergate, the story led to furious denials from anonymous government sources—only this time The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post rallied strenuously to defend the feds.
The New York Times Editorial Board—having wisely endorsed legalization of marijuana last July and shattered some myths—should have added in its Monday editorial about
Afghanistan's Unending Addiction a few sentences of comparison between the $7.6 billion down-the-toilet U.S. tax dollars spent trying to eradicate opium production in that country and the hundreds of billions wasted on locking people up in the U.S. domestic war on drugs over the past four decades:
The narcotics program embraced multiple strategies, including interdicting drug traffickers, eradicating poppy fields, strengthening the Afghan legal system to prosecute drug dealers, persuading farmers to grow alternative crops and establishing treatment programs for addicts. The Pentagon, one of the lead agencies in the effort, has pinned the failure to reduce cultivation largely on a lack of support from the Afghan government.
It must also be said, however, that American, European, Afghan and United Nations officials at times sabotaged their own mission by bickering over how the money should be spent and where best to focus resources.
It seems unlikely that the new and still fragile Afghan government will soon do better on poppy eradication than the United States and its allies, whose forces in Afghanistan are expected to be reduced to 15,000 by the end of the year.
E.J. Dionne Jr. at
The Washington Post offers his take on
The secrets behind the midterms:
There's a hidden history to the nasty midterm election campaign that will, mercifully, end on Nov. 4. What's not being widely talked about is as important as what's in the news.
Underappreciated fact No. 1: The number of Democratic seats that are not in play this year.
In planning its effort to take control of the Senate, Republicans shrewdly launched challenges to Democrats in states that would not automatically be on a GOP target list. "Broadening the map" is wise when you're in a strong position.
Two of the states on that extended list, Colorado and Iowa, have paid off for Republicans. It's still far from certain that they will defeat Sen. Mark Udall in Colorado or Rep. Bruce Braley in Iowa, who is trying to hold retiring Sen. Tom Harkin's seat. But Republicans have a clear shot at both, and this has strengthened their chances of taking the majority.
Victor Menotti at
CommonDreams writes
'Koch Congress' Could Make Oligarchy Official:
This summer, participants in the Kochs’ secret billionaires’ summit pledged to raise $500 million to take the Senate in 2014 midterm elections. After four decades of funding front groups and an elaborate ideology they call “economic freedom,” the Kochs embody today’s emerging American oligarchy. No one else can even compare.
At risk are the rights of all Americans, especially women, workers, voters, veterans, as well as the protection of our rapidly warming Earth, since the Kochs’ end game is to defend their carbon based wealth by continuing to pollute politics and the planet for free. In all the noise of this election season, there has been little discussion of the fact that two billionaire brothers are about to have “power of the purse” over the world’s wealthiest nation.
Not even John D. Rockefeller ever managed to pull together a radical faction as powerful as Kochs have through today’s Tea Party.
Ben Adler at
Grist writes
Are enviros smart to back Republican Susan Collins?
Environmental groups that want to demonstrate their bipartisanship haven’t been left with many Republicans to support. In this election cycle, Maine Sen. Susan Collins stands out. She unequivocally accepts climate science. In 2009, she cosponsored a “cap-and-dividend” bill to limit emissions with Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.). She is the only Senate Republican to vote against preventing EPA from regulating greenhouse gas emissions. The Environmental Defense Fund ran an ad earlier this year praising her for “confronting climate change.” The League of Conservation Voters endorsed her. Her lifetime environmental voting score from LCV is 67 percent. That’s low for someone the group has endorsed, but unusually high for a Republican.
But in Monday’s Senate debate in Maine, Collins may have given greens some reasons to doubt her commitment to their cause. The first question was how the candidates would bring down energy costs for consumers. Collins said that we should “increase the supply of natural gas” and renewables, and that “we should pursue the use of our locally grown wood.” Natural gas and wood are not necessarily any better for the climate than coal. Both release carbon when burned, and while they release less than coal, they can actually have higher emissions over the course of their whole life cycle, depending on how they are extracted. Collins then criticized her opponent, Democrat Shenna Bellows, for supporting a carbon tax, and demanded to know how much that would increase electricity prices. [...]
The big question is whether Collins will be a reliable vote for climate action going forward. This week’s debate offered hints that could be interpreted either way. When asked whether anthropogenic climate change is happening, she unambiguously said yes. But her criticism of a carbon tax’s cost to citizens is worrisome. To reach the U.S.’s ultimate goal of reducing carbon emissions 80 percent from 1990 levels by 2050, Congress must pass a price on carbon that raises the cost of energy derived from fossil fuels.
Sady Doyle at
In These Times writes
Amy Poehler’s Radical Niceness:
[I]n her new memoir, Yes Please, she relates a story about chasing a man through an airport, screaming, because he’d told her that she didn’t belong in first class. (Sample quotes: “You rich motherfucker! Who do you think you are? You’re not better than me. Fuck you and your fucking opinions, you piece of shit.”) If she’s “nice,” it’s not the kind that requires behaving like a doormat or withholding your opinions.
But there is a genuine big-heartedness underlying Poehler’s work. She seems genuinely committed to the people in her life, and to making the world a better place. You can see it in Parks and Recreation, where her character, Leslie Knope, transformed over the course of the series from an uptight, dowdy bureaucrat to the most beloved person in Pawnee, Indiana, due largely to Poehler’s own intense likability as an actress.
Jessica Valenti at
The Guardian writes
Real equality is when women have the right to be as drunk and stupid as men:
Youthful transgressions may not be our best moments, but they’re also part of growing up. And let’s face it—a lot of them were really fun too. So I can’t help but be put off by the neverending stream of “advice” thrown at young women about how to be “safe” or “respect ourselves”—advice that boys of the same age never hear. [...]
Young women need to be able to move around the world with the same amount of stupid that men do because, if women are held to a higher standard of behavior, and we’re inevitably blamed if—and when—we don’t adhere to it.
Take Caroline Kitchens of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, for example. Kitchens, who previously characterized concern over rape culture as “hysteria”, recently published a video in which she suggests that, if women don’t want to be raped, they shouldn’t get drunk. It’s not a new line of thinking—last year Slate’s Emily Yoffe came under fire for writing that the “common denominator” in rapes is alcohol instead of, you know, rapists.
In addition to just being ineffective—women get raped drunk and sober, in skirts and in sweatpants—warnings to avoid alcohol in order to avoid being raped send a clear message to women: you can never make a mistake, or any crime committed against you will be at least partially your fault.