Bob Felton's Civil Commotion is a blog I discovered doing a little technorati-surfing just now. I'm intrigued because the author is clearly a conservative, but clearly a thinking one. He wrote a really great post (actually, a bunch) about the current right-to-die case that's got everyone's attention.

So after approvingly linking to the above, and hopeful because of the very reasonable content, I'm going to dispute another post and use the ol' trackback. Maybe we can get a little cross-blog debate going. Here's an old movement-conservative saw I'd like to take a crack at:

Oh, yeah, that bias

The Columbia School of Journalism has just released a study which finds — GASP! — that news stories were slanted anti-Bush 3-times more often than slanted anti-Kerry during the 2004 election.

My prediction: The MSM will roll their eyes, insist it isn’t so, and continue to wonder where their readers are going.

It’s evolution at work, right in front of our eyes; non-adapters die.

It's fun to bash the MainStream Media and all, but I have serious doubts about the study in question. A look at the footnotes reveals the following:

The analysis of election coverage begins after March 1 (Super Tuesday) after John Kerry emerged as the all-but-official Democratic candidate. The cross-media comparisons of campaign coverage included stories focused at least 50% on one candidate or the other so that deriving a sense of tone about the candidate was logical. Those totaled 250 stories. The findings, moreover, reinforce what the Project found in a separate study that looked at tone in the final month of the campaign, surrounding the debates, and in a pre-convention study using a different methodology that mapped coverage of different character themes about the candidates.

This is highly problematic. Looking at a total of 250 stories in an eight-month timespan in which a 24-hour news cycle is at work is hardly a scientifically significant sample. There's no actual data given about the separate studies referenced, and it's also unclear from the footnotes what sources these 250 stories came from, as they were apparently not drawn from the same sample as the much broader study of the war coverage (which included 10x as many stories).

And then there's this:

The findings on tone also mirror those of Robert Lichter and the Center on Media and Public Affairs, which employs a different approach to studying tone.

Robert Lichter is a conservative activist, and the CMPA (while claiming non-partisan tax-exempt status) is a well known conservative organ with an agenda of hostility to environmentalism and consumer's rights. Their "scientific" the metrics for determining a "positive" or "negative" attitude are notoriously bogus, and Lichter has been pushing to discredit the press as liberally-biased and "elite" for more than two decades. The fact that he was cited as a supporting example raises many more questions about this study than it answers.

Furthermore, the study's small sample of stories voids the impact of contextualization, and clearly didn't take into account the influence of anchor-opinion, which is widely understood as having as much (or more) impact on public sentiment than individual press reports themselves. In fact, when Bob remarks that the MSM will continue to wonder "where their readers go," he fails to complete the loop which is that more and more people turn to opinionated columnists and news-roundup anchors (and, yes, bloggers) not for raw information, but more importantly for meaning.

To bring it on home, I'm as upset with the state of journalism and the media as anyone, but the idea that there's a "liberal bias" at work is crap. It's a documented revolutionary tactic designed to discredit sources of information that are hostile to movement conservativism. It's part of a conscious strategy that has been at work for decades, and the fact that intelligent and moral people still fall for it is a testiment to how well Trotskyite tactics have worked for the radical right.

If there's a bias in the mainstream media it's towards mediocrity, towards compacency, towards consumption, towards business as usual. I agree that there's an information revolution coming, but the reasons for this revolution have to do with the unaccountability of the media establishment -- note this is different from "elitism" -- how easily the press corps can be manipulated, and how poorly the current state of journalism fulfills its role of guarding the public interest against the private. The answer isn't a more partisan media or a more "balanced" media, it's a more inquisitive and truthful one which concerns itself not just with telling two sides of the story, but in finding out which one is right.

An honest media with a driving sense of public service would likely still be imbalanced in covering a presidential election. But it's hard to accuse the facts of bias.

A few days ago, I thought we had 'em. The credit card/bankrupcy bill and ANWR oil drilling passed the Senate and the House was sinking ever lower into the gurgling ethics scandal that has been brewing there ever since Tom Delay and his cohort started enacting procedural changes to cement the dominance of their 1994 "Contract With America," which was itself driven in large part by perceved ethical weakness on the opposite side of the isle.

I thought we had 'em. A wedge issue; a clear rallying point for the political base; a high-road means of attacking some of the most powerful figures in the GOP machine... and then they trotted out a (literally, not pejoratively) brain-dead woman from Florida, and everyone forgot about all that other shit.

This is a classic move, and politically very shrewd. Here's an issue that few Democrats have a solid opposition stance to (hint: it's here and here, folks), and which splits their caucus. Here's an issue that provides ready TV images, with the heightened emotional charge of "a life hanging in the balance."

Yes. You can see the logic. Here's something to take everyone's mind off the fact that there's solid proof that Tom Delay is crooked. Pay no attention to the fact that our Senate just voted to let unrestrained usury be business as usual in the credit card industry. Forget that as part of the overall budgeting process, Senate republicans have succeeded in opening up one of the last pristine stretches of American territory to petrochemical companies in the vain delusion that this will somehow make up for our lack of a coherant energy problem. Let's get back to the real issue, one vegitative woman in Florida and the lack of a solid moral message from the Democratic party.

Oh yeah; and it's the two year anneversary of the war. That's still happening, remeber?

The Republican Noise Machine is a powerful entity. The good guys won a round on Social Security, and I like to think I had a little part in that, but the volly has now been returned with plenty of topspin. How the Democrats handle what comes next is important. Once the pressure is off, if the GOP is able to build any momentum it will be hard to get it back. Someone on the left is going to need to go on the offensive pretty soon, or else driving at all the real issues is going to be more difficult.

A week ago, I thought we had 'em, and in the Long Game we very well might. But the ease with which everything was shifted is alarming. If the Democrats want to recapture the House (and they can) they need a strategy for a full-court-press. It's not fucking complecated; just a lot of work. I'll have more on this later.

I had an interesting bit of conversation on Thursday with Kate before getting too blotto. She was saying how a friend has gotten to like reading my website. "But he never posts anything anymore," she said. "I found the old stuff," was the reply.

The old stuff. Yeah. It was a different kind of scene then. There was a time when this was really a diary and the politics and news stuff went somewhere else. Then my life changed, and so did the diary; the politics came in, in a very conventional kind of way, I might add. It was good for a while, and then I got very busy and my life -- for the most part -- became very boring, my thoughts specific and narrow. I worked in a cubicle. I slept in a bare-walled room.

And now things are in play again. The reformation is still coming. The trip is going to be a kind of new level. I wonder about how to look again at mixing the personal, the political, the poetic and the imaginary. A new blend. Simplicy, focus.

I'm not really a great "blogger" in the sense of the form of finding neat things online and sending people links. I'm not a voracious enough consumer of web media for that. I'm more of a diarist, writer and sometime essayist. The setup is taking form. I have some good stories to tell.

It will be more like the old stuff.

Sterling Newberry :: So We Want A Revolution

Let us begin from the obvious truth: there are a billion people who seek to join the affluent society, primarily in China. Our current means of extracting this life from the fruits of the earth requires oil. Right now, the developed world outside of the United States supports 500 million people on 25% of the world's capacity for oil. A simple multiplication - there are 6 billions in the world - means that we would have to produce 3 barrels of oil for every one we produce today. There is no such capacity available, and even if it were, the pollution would cook the world and flood almost every ancient capital and booming new metropolis on the planet. This is the overwhelming fact from which there is no escape, not in this world, nor to any other: we cannot support the population of the world at a tolerable standard of living with the society and technology we have. The economy we have is inadequeate to the challenges we face.

Sterling is one of those people who really shows you where the relationship between eccentricity and genius lies. I like his writing quite a lot, even if -- like the rest of us -- he could use an editor from time to time. This whole piece is worth reading and thinking about.

St Pat's a couple years ago was the last time I cheated, when I did the greedy thing. So I want to go on record as refusing a svelt 35-year-old woman from Texas with a great friendly dog and huge wonderful tits in similarly compromised circumstances. After much conversation and flirting, I turned down the offer to walk her home. I felt bad about saying no, but good about refusing. It's a new thing to me. Selah.

I'm done with my business and enjoying a Guiness w/espresso shot. Contrary to what you might think if you didn't know my middle name was McCue (and my Grandmother's maiden name was Merryweather), I'm one of those whiskey-loving shower-skipping decendents of the emerald isle. At least on my mother's side.

So cheers. Take a load off and have a pint and tell some stories. That's what the holiday is all about.

It appears that with the votes of three Democrats (Landreau from oil-industry heavy Louisiana and two from Hawaii apparently because they support the rights of native people to determine how to use local resources) the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge will be opened to oil and natural gas development. Chafee, Snowe, McCain, Coleman, Smith, and Collins were Republicans who opposed.

The interesting thing about this is that the ANWR doesn't have nearly enough oil to make any substantial impact on prices or long-term sustainability of our energy policy. Everyone knows this. Everyone also knows that very very few Americans will ever visit the ANWR. This was a symbolic battle, one that has been going on a long time and it's really about the principle of conservation versus the principle of development. One of the problems in Washington DC is that a lot of the battles fought become similarly divorced from reality, politics operating in it's own ecosystem. The results of such fights don't amount to good governance no matter how they turn out.

How environmental groups react to this symbolic defeat is going to be interesting. There's a real opportunity for environmental advocacy groups to seize the mantle of pragmatism within the realm of energy policy. It will be interesting to see if they take it.

Apropops the "serious" stuff below, here's a grand tradition I'm proud to see is still in operation: free beef with your tires, at Les Schwab.

When John Bolton's nomination to be Ambassador to the UN was announced, the Republican talking points were locked in:" he's a guy with experience who knows how to get things done." The response from the opposition were some rather disparaging quotes he made about the UN, and it all blew over becuase no one really cared all that much.

But now there's some video. It really makes you think. Watch it.

It's one thing to read a quote by a guy saying "the UN doesn't exist." It's another thing to see him shouting (realy shouting) at a bunch of other diplomats: "The United States make the UN work when it wants it to work, and that is exactly the way it should be because the only question, the only question for the United States is what's in our national interest."

It's this beligerent mix of imperialistic power -- "we make it work when we want to make it work" -- and isolationist mindset -- "the only question is what's in our interest" -- that I find so disturbing in the Bush Doctrine. It is a cocktail of some of the worst elements in the US national character. It is the dark side of "exceptionalism," the attitude that we are special, we are powerful, and therefore things should work out according to our desires. Why? Because.

This is dangerous stuff! The reality of the situation is we are not that powerful; we are not exempt from history, and we cannot exist as we currently do without the support of other nations around the world.

From an economic perspective we have lost our base of industrial productivity and now maintain ourselves through consumption and finance. Now, if we were running a tight ship (e.g. balancing our budget, investing in infrastructure, living within our means) that kind of post-industrial information economy might work. But we're not doing that. We're in a structural decline. Our currency is dependent on the generosity of Asian central banks; our consumption is financed through runinous consumer debt; and our corporations have taken the concept of financialization to the logical extreme, maximizing shareholder value by any means necesssary. All this while our educational institutions crumble, our middle class dwindles and our base of small business and enterprise is ground under by the advance of franchises, big box retail and foreign-made goods created with what really essentially amounts to slave labor.

This is not a strong economy. It is a large one, the largest on the planet, but it is fundimentally unhealthy. It is fat. It is dumb. It is greedy. And it is bleeding. This cannot last. In our lifetimes we will either lead the world by reforming our own systems, or we will drag the world down with our decadence.

From a military perspective as well, we are really not as muscular as the hawks would like you to believe. Attempting to win the peace in Iraq is straining our resources to the limit, and in the paradigm of 4th Generation Warfare simple killing power is not enough to create security. We cannot bomb our way out of our problems -- we must prevail in the moral sphere. At the moment we are failing mightily to do this. No matter how much we may pat ourselves on the back for being "liberators," the truth is no one throws roses down in the paths of American troops. They plant bombs by the side of the road. This isn't the sort of situation you can get our of through force alone; you have to be wise, and willing to let other people get what they want. One really can't imagine Bolton helping out much in this respect.

And thta's pretty much the point. Much like Paul Wolfowitz's nomination to head the World Bank, Bolton's nomination is a message from the People In Charge that they are going to continue to have it there way, and the rest of the world can either get on board or get bent. It will probably continue to work for a while, but it takes us further along a badly charted course. As some point, the shit has to start adding up. Just watch this video and think about what it means that this guy has been hand-picked to represent the United States to the rest of the world. It's a sign of the times.

If you live in Alaska, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Virginia, or Wisconsin, you have a Sentator -- someone who is supposed to represent you -- on the Foreign Relations Committee. They're the people who will evaluate Bolton for his job. If you live in one of these states, pick up the phone. If you've never called your Congressperson or Senator, now's a good time to get the experience. It's really not hard, and it does matter. America needs to have this conversation.

The New York Times: Bush Seeks to Ban Some Nations From All Nuclear Technology

In what amounts to a reinterpretation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, Mr. Bush now argues that there is a new class of nations that simply cannot be trusted with the technology to produce nuclear material even if the treaty itself makes no such distinction.

This is pretty interesting. The diplomatic tactics at work here are shady, and the scope is too exceptionalist, but this development shows that lightbulbs are going off above some heads on Team Bush. You can't have widespread nuclear power without the widespread possibility of nuclear weapons. Reactors require all sorts of dual-use technology, and they also make great places to hide clandestine enrichment and development facilities.

The problem is that with the breakdown of the cold war balance of power, having some nations go around and tell others that certain energy technologies are off limits is a recipie for trouble. The opportunity here is for some bold peacenik to propose the real solution: a global ban on nuclear power. That's a non-starter, but if you're serious about preventing enemy nations from constructing atomic weapons and you want to make sure other states aren't building stuff on the side which can be sold, the first step to a working enforcement regime is shutting down the cooling towers.

More broadly, it strikes me again that so many of our political conflicts have roots in thermodynamics. I remember being a kid and talking with my chemist father about the possibilities of cold fusion, how there might come a time when everyone would have their own "Personal Sun." That''s a recipie for a kind of utopia, as long as people didn't, say, start using their PS to shoot lasers at one another.

In any event, there's a growing consciousness on the left and right that energy issues are really at the root of a lot of problems we'd like to fix. Maybe the Apollo Alliance will finally get some play.