Thursday, August 30, 2007

London Columnist-Politician Offers Great Insight Into Carroll Controversy



A brilliantly reasoned essay from London columnist and politician Boris Johnson offers some great insight into our local controversy in Carroll, Iowa, involving some football players displaying what is widely regarded as an offensive gesture.

You can read the full story on the matter in the Carroll Daily Times Herald as well as my column there today.

Boris boils it down for us, too, though: It's time for adults to be adults again.

We won't restore civility to our streets until we realise that we all - collectively - need to recover our nerve and reassert our adult prerogatives.

GOP's Hispanic Snubbing Reason To Be 'Howling' Mad

The Virginia blogger with one of the best Net handles you'll find -- Howling Latina -- astutely observes the Republicans near-unanimous snubbing of the presidential debate scheduled for Univision next month shows the GOP may be dismissing the Hispanic vote -- and sticking with what one political scientist has told Iowa Independent is a "brown-is-the-new-pink" strategy.

Howling Latina weighs in on the fact that only U.S. Sen. John McCain agreed to show up for the now cancelled debate on the Republican side. The Democrats are debating on September 9 in Miami.

You can read the rest of my story on this at Iowa Independent.

Dr. Kaul answers the nation's burning questions


By Donald Kaul

Burning questions of the day:

Q---What will the resignation of Karl Rove from the White House staff mean?

A---That’s like asking what it meant when Vlad the Impaler hung up his spike. A lot less looting, pillaging and sacking of cities for one thing.

Q---Was Rove really that important?

A---Yes he was. He was the president’s chief political strategist and hit man, no more malign than the rest of the White House crowd but far more effective. He was the architect of the divide-and-conquer strategy that proved so successful over two elections.

Unfortunately, while divide-and-conquer may win elections it is a hell of a way to run a country, which is why we now see the nation in disarray and Mr. Bush’s reputation in well-deserved tatters.

So, with no more presidential elections to fix and the White House looking like the orphanage in a Dickens novel, Mr. Rove said he’s leaving to spend more time with his family.

His family’s loss is our gain.

Q---Do you think Barack Obama has enough experience to be president?

A---No, I don’t. Mr. Obama is a bright young man with a relatively short resume, virtually none of it in foreign affairs. He could use more seasoning. This is a trait he shares, in varying degrees, with Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney and John McCain.

On the other hand, the most prepared man we’ve ever had coming into the presidency was probably George Bush the Elder---congressman, envoy to China, ambassador to the United Nations, director of the CIA and vice-president. The best you can say about his presidency is that when he got us into Iraq, he had sense enough to get out quickly. Would that his son were as bright.

Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon each came to office having been a congressman, senator and vice-president and each was, in his own way, a disaster. Experience is overrated.

Q---My Daddy says that the Democrats are weak on defense. What do you say?

A---Kid, I’m sorry to break the news to you but your Daddy is an idiot. It sounds as though he voted for Bush twice (three times if he lived in Ohio). Democrats are far too cowardly to be weak on defense.

This is a country that spends as much on “defense” as the rest of the world put together, allies included. Yet its politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike, are always clamoring for more to be spent. It is a country that complains about “waste, fraud and abuse” in government, yet barely responds to the fact that our military establishment is the epicenter of waste, fraud and abuse. It is a country that claims to be peace loving, but has been in virtually constant warfare for the past 65 years.

Weak on defense? Don’t I wish.

Q---Is Barry Bonds’ breaking of Hank Aaron’s homerun record legitimate?

A---Your mistake is in thinking that Bonds broke Aaron’s record. He didn’t. He set his own. Aaron, in turn, did not break Babe Ruth’s.

It is a convenient fiction that baseball records from different eras are comparable. They are not.

The conditions under which the game is played evolve constantly. There is the dead ball era, the lively ball era, the era of small parks, large parks, the spitball era, the slider era, the night baseball era, the era of train travel, of thin bats and thick, of weight lifting and batting helmets, high pitching mounds and low. Under these shifting conditions, no two records can have the same weight. Bonds has dominated the steroid era. That’s all you can say.

In any case, a nation that habitually drugs its children to make them ruly, encourages its women to mutilate themselves in search of youth and whose men extend their sexual lives by chemical means, should not condemn the use of performance-enhancing drugs by athletes.

Personally, if someone offered me a drug that would make me write like Mark Twain, I’d take it.

EDITORS NOTE: MinutemanMedia.org is seeking, after all these years, to become a bit higher profile. For this reason we would be grateful if you would credit us with any piece you may use: "Distributed by MinutemanMedia.org." (or similar).

Art Neu: Craig Episode May Help End 'Nonsense' Of Social Issue Dominance

The unfolding story surrounding U.S. Sen. Larry Craig has reinforced former Iowa Lt. Gov. Art Neu's view that the Republican Party should focus on economic and foreign policy issues, public-sphere matters of grave seriousness, rather than banking on values-posturing that so often exposes human frailty and outright hypocrisy.

What's more, Neu, a Carroll attorney and something of an ambassador from an era of more civil politics -- the days of Robert Ray's governorship -- said he thinks President Bush's unpopularity and a cascade of scandals involving the "terrible" hypocrisy of social conservatives could crack open the door to an older-school Republican approach he and Ray represented in Iowa.

"I don't think it's necessary that candidates keep telling us what good Christians they are," Neu said. "The people I knew in politics who were good Christians didn't have to announce it."

Read the rest of the story at Read the rest of the story at Iowa Independent.

Iowa GOP leader: Cut 'dead wood' Craig

Iowa State Sen. Jeff Angelo, R- Creston, today said his party is primed to beat the woman he believes will be the likely Democratic presidential nominee on taxes and natural security if the GOP has the courage to cut “dead wood” figures like disgraced U.S. Sen. Larry Craig from its ranks.

Moreover, the Craig matter shows Republicans the edge-of-the-cliff potential with giving personal values issues top billing in a national party agenda. One mistake (a la Craig) and the dominoes fall, says Angelo.

“We set ourselves up for that when we put socially conservative issues out front,” Angelo tells Iowa Independent. “Human beings will let you down.”

Read the rest of the story at Iowa Independent.

Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Gravel: High School Should End At 16

In an editorial in the New York Sun long-shot Democratic presidential candidate Mike Gravel has some radical takes on high school and young people in the workplace.

Children are different than they were 30 years ago. They reach puberty much earlier and they're exposed to a lot early on that it doesn't make sense to maintain the traditional 12-year academic track. We need to start schooling children earlier and getting them into the workforce sooner. Parents should have the option of entering two-year-olds into school programs that offer reading instruction. Starting at 10 years old, students should remain in school until 5 o'clock with mandatory extracurricular activities and supervised individual study.

High school should start at 13 years and end at 16. All college-bound poor students should be given tuition assistance. Those who don't want to attend college should receive publicly funded technical training. Tax breaks should be given to companies that hire and train teenagers to perform technology-based jobs. The right way to fight outsourcing is not by erecting trade barriers but by preparing our youth to compete.


(This is crossposted at Iowa Independent.com)

Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Don't Go Into Journalism

AUGUST 8, 2007

By Donald Kaul

The New York Times reports a new and shocking trend at universities: they’re charging extra for courses in lucrative fields, business for example. That’s not the shocking part. Universities have always charged more for graduate courses in fields that promised students higher paychecks when they got out of school. Moving the practice over to undergraduate education is merely an extension of that.

The shocking part is that Arizona State University is charging a $250-per-semester premium for courses in (begin ital) journalism. (end ital)

What do they charge for courses in buggy whip manufacture, $500?

Journalism, in case you haven’t noticed, is in a state of rapidly accelerating decline. It has become obsolescent, which is the term economists use instead of “Dead Man Walking.”

The latest signpost on journalism’s road to oblivion is last week’s sale of the Wall Street Journal to Rupert Murdock. Rupert Murdock! Is nothing sacred?

The Wall Street Journal is one of the crown jewels of American journalism. Despite an editorial page that has yet to enter the 20th century let alone the 21st, it has been a beacon of excellence in a sea of mediocrity. It collects Pulitzer Prizes by the bushel.

Rupert Murdock is an Australian who entered the news business through the medium of supermarket tabloids, the kind that interview space aliens. He owns and directs the Fox News franchise. Enough said.

A.J. Liebling, one of the great press critics of the post-World War II period, once wrote, “A newspaperman’s life is like the plot of ‘Black Beauty.’ Sometimes he finds a kind master who gives him a dry stall and an occasional bran mush in the form of a Christmas bonus, sometimes he falls into the hands of a mean owner who drives him in spite of spavins and expect him to live on potato peelings.”

So too with newspapers, apparently. The Wall St. Journal is the corporate version of Black Beauty. Off his record, Murdock is that mean owner.

It’s not as though it’s a new trend of course. When I entered the business some 50 years ago there were dozens of papers throughout the country with a legitimate claim to distinction. Now there is a meager handful and hardly one of them can honestly claim to be as good as it used to be.

Newspapers always had to walk a line between being a successful business and an institution that served its community “without fear or favor.” As ownership has become more corporate the emphasis has shifted from the journalism function to profits.

Then there’s television. Television was a stepsister to print journalism 50 years ago. Television producers used to read newspapers to find out where to send their cameras. By the time I quit fulltime writing, it was the ink-stained wretches who were trailing the TV people, although they hated to admit it.

And now, God save us all, we have the Internet, which has not merely damaged journalism it has atomized it. It turns on its head the old journalism slogan: “You are entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own set of facts.” On the Internet there is no distinction between fact and opinion. In that atmosphere, there is no such thing as journalism.

And that is the world that Arizona State is charging extra to prepare its graduates to enter.

If I were running a big university (and I’m available, by the way) I would forget journalism and institute a premium course in handymanship.

You remember handymen, those Jacks (and now Jills) of all trades who could do little jobs around the house? We live in a society where hardly anyone other than a farmer can do those things anymore. There is a great need out there for people who can fix toilets, caulk showers, hang doors, repair screens, sharpen knives, change water filters, make sliding doors slide and fix doorbells. For a reasonable price.

A person with skills like that could clean up.

Are you listening, Arizona State?

--

Sunday, August 12, 2007

Boris Johnson: The World's Mayor




Conservative MP Boris Johnson of England once joked that his favorite politician, his role model in fact, is the mayor in the movie "Jaws."


Boris Johnson, perhaps the wittiest columnist in the English language, is now running for mayor of London. Usually here at Iowa Political Alert we keep things to Iowa -- or at least inside the nation's borders. But for years we have been following Boris' columns which he writes weekly.

Rudy Giuliani may be the "nation's mayor" but one can make a case that the brilliantly irreverant Boris would be the world's mayor if elected.

Romney-Huckabee: Does Straw Poll 1-2 Finish Presage 2008 Ticket?




(Cross posted at Iowa Independent.com)
Apparently anyone who can lose 110 pounds shouldn't be taken lightly.

While Mitt Romney's organizational juggernaut prevailed like the Soviets in hockey back in the day, the headline from the Iowa Straw Poll today is one from hope, both Arkansas (boyhood home of an obesity-beating governor) and message.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee proved clairvoyant with one of his own lines in Hilton Coliseum on Saturday.

"The soil is awfully fertile in the valley," Huckabee said.

Coming from among the pack, Huckabee finished second in the straw poll with 2,587 votes of the 14,302 cast. Mitt Romney pulled in 4,516.

While the fire-breathing Coloradoan Tom Tancredo rhetorically punched up immigrants, and other candidates just failed to connect (scoreboard, baby), Romney and Huckabee both offered messages that were decidedly optimistic, and in Huckabee's case, funny.

"A Republican in my state feels about as out of place as a Michael Vick at the Westminster Dog Show," Huckabee said. If you don't get that joke you're not voting in any Republican primaries or caucuses anyway.

You can read the rest of the story at Iowa Independent.

Could Ron Paul Have An Angle With Smokers?




BELLINGHAM, Wash. -- Earlier this week, while on vacation hiking Washington State's Olympic Mountains, I took a quick daytrip from Seattle to Vancouver, stopping in Bellingham to eat lunch.

In the historic district of this northern Washington city I went into a tobacco shop that had a large Ron Paul sign in the window and a stack of Paul for President pamphlets on the counter.

As I purchased a pack of American Spirit Ultra Lights I asked the clerk if Paul had some kind of organized effort in tobacco shops and bars, a sort of smoker's rights thing going on -- considering the Texan's libertarian views.

The clerk seemed suspcious of my question so I settled for the cigarettes and a nifty new lighter.

But the thought stuck with me: Could Paul have an angle with smokers? With smoking bans extending to private property (at least give bars and casinos a pass) it would make sense for Paul to seek votes among the smokers clustered curbside.

The rest of this story can be read at Iowa Independent.com.

But Wait, We have Elvis And A Gun!



(Cross Posted At Iowa Independent)
The Duncan Hunter folks had to feel something like the kid at the science fair who has the lame exhibit in the corner, next to the door that leads to a septic tank or perhaps a closet full of wrestling shorts the team manager has neglected.
But the Hunter people weren't taking lightly any dismissive comments from national media types at Saturday's Iowa Straw Poll.
When a TV reporter approached Hunter's national communications director as he was barbecuing corn on the cob, and asked the staffer about the relatively "small" size of the Hunter shindig north of Hilton Coliseum, Roy Tyler had a ready answer.
"What do you mean small?" Tyler shot back. "We have Elvis Presley and the only homemade ice cream."
Read the rest of the story at Iowa Independent.com.