Thursday Scramble is when I post an entry from one of my blogs onto all the other blogs. This one comes from Thinking The Lions.
For just over a year, every week I would ask Sweetie to name a "Hunk of
The Week," and then discuss that Hunk. Hunk Number 57 has, for nearly
two years, been the highest rated post on that blog. Here it is:
He may have abs and cutoffs, but I have a new nickname for underwear... (Sweetie's Hunk of the Week, 57)
Each week, I sit down to do this with but one thought in mind: should this be the week that I write about a Hunk in entirely limerick form?
Then I answer that thought this way: "Mr Bunches, put your pants back on!"
The 57th Hunk of the Week is: Robby Benson!
You Don't Know Him Without You Have... man, I don't know. For the past two weeks or so, we've had Beauty And The Beast
more or less on continuous play; it's Mr Bunches' favorite movie right
now, and that's probably why Sweetie had Robby Benson on the brain, but
you can't really say you know him from a cartoon, especially a cartoon where he looked like this:
Which, come to think of it, kind of looks like Robby Benson, now:
And even a little bit like Robby Benson then:
But even if he kind of looks like the Beast, if the Beast were to play Michael Landon in a TV biopic, you can't really say you know Robby Benson from Beauty And The Beast. You might know him from Ice Castles,
But, first, who would admit they watched Ice Castles, besides Sweetie, who considers that one of the top movies of all time (ranking it right up there with Miss March and That One Movie Where They Use A Motorcycle In A Ballet), and
Second, why is that picture of Robby Benson in his underwear just about the only picture you find when you search for "Robby Benson Ice Castles?"
Is Ice Castles some sort of slang for underwear and nobody told me? Are "tighty-whities" now called Ice Castles?
Because they totally should be.
When I asked Sweetie where I might know Robby Benson from, other than those two movies, she said "Ode To Billy Joe," which I heard as Ode To Billy Joel, and I immediately thought "Billy Joel had a movie made about him? And nobody has ever made a movie about Piano Man? Or about Scenes From An Italian Restaurant? I mean, I know nothing about Billy Joel's actual life, other than that for a while there I thought he
had married Princess Leia, only that was Paul Simon, but aren't either
of those songs better source material for a movie than Billy Joel's actual life?"
Then I realized I misheard her and thought "Who's Billy Joe?"
Robby Benson was also in The Godfather Part II,
which I never bothered to see. I saw Part III back when it first came
out to theaters, and didn't like it or hate it. Then I finally saw The Godfather on DVD a couple years back, and it was bad.
Aside from [SPOILER ALERT BUT UNLESS YOU'RE A FILM BUFF OR 75 YEARS
OLD YOU WON'T WANT TO SEE THE MOVIE SO IT DOESN'T MATTER] the part where
the guy gets shot at the toll booth, it really was slow-moving and
boring. And I couldn't understand Marlon Brando at all. That's not
acting; that's talking with your mouth full.
So we're back to you don't know about Robby Benson unless you're Sweetie. Thing That Makes You Go Hmmm About Him:This is an actual fact Sweetie shared with me about Robby Benson yesterday:
His full name is Robin.
To which I said:
"That's kind of weird."
We then had this exchange:
Sweetie: "I know. I thought so."
Me: "It's kind of a girl's name."
Sweetie: "Yes, it is."
Me: "I know about Robin Williams, and Robin Hood, but still... Robin is a girl's name."
Sweetie: "I know."
So you can see that the romance has not left our marriage.
Also, Robby Benson has been married for 27 years and has two kids, Lyric and Zephyr. I thought for a second there that those were names of the muses, which I would then say was okay because Robby Benson is in the arts, but they're not. They're just words he liked.
Celebrities: Just name your kids regular names. People named "Zephyr" start out a couple steps behind the rest of us in achieving things in society, you know. People named Zephyr, and Kal-El, and other weird names.
Addition:
Sweetie also reminded me, after she read this, that she'd mentioned
that Robby Benson auditioned for the part of Luke Skywalker in Star Wars.
That would've made for an interesting kind of movie: Luke leaves
Tatooine and heads off with Han to deliver Artoo to the Princess, only
to get sidetracked by an ice-dancing competition three parsecs from the
Kessel Spice Run, and then wins by batting his eyes a soulful manner.
Reason I Thought Sweetie Liked Him:
Because of this:
Which
is a picture of Robby Benson taken back in the 1970s or something, when
it was totally cool to take what were essentially child-porn pictures,
like that one, or like this one:
Which is the picture that comes up when you Google Ice Castles, so what I assumed is this: Sweetie, having watched Beauty and the Beast 100 gazillion times since we bought it, got nostalgic for the time when she was the only person, ever, who watched Ice Castles, and googled it, got Robby Benson in his underwear, and fell in love all over again.
Actual Reason Sweetie Likes Him: "When
I was little I liked him, and Randolph Mantooth and Mark Spitz... I've
always been a sucker for guys with dark hair and blue eyes. Plus, Robby
Benson just has that innocence about him."
Point I'd Like To Make About Sweetie's Actual Reason For Liking Him: I am notably lacking in the departments of (a) blue eyes, (b) dark hair, (c) hair, and (d) being named Mantooth.
But that latter one is actually a plus on my side. Also a plus? I've never worn anything like this:
On the minus side of my scoresheet are that I've also never worn this:
or this:
But I'm thinking of breaking out that outfit for our anniversary next month. Rrrwowr!
If you listened to the recent Planet Money podcast "Coin vs. Bill" you learned a bunch of interesting things about money in politics including that John McCain thinks you should pay tax on that jar of pennies you keep in your bedroom.
Coin vs. Bill wasn't set up as a podcast to demonstrate the inevitability of money being injected into politics and the weird ways that money gets in there -- ways not imagined by Citizens United and far harder to root out and know about than millionaires putting up vanity candidates like Santorum and Gingrich, such candidates being the primary result (puns always intended) of that decision so far: Corporations continue to act rationally, for the most part, funding both parties because they believe money buys access, not elections (it does, in ways that I'll talk about in the future) while millionaires and billionaires throw money at each other in an attempt to prove... something?
(For those who continue to fret about the role of money in politics based on SuperPACs and Stephen Colbert ratings stunts, consider this: Neither Santorum nor Gingrich has a viable candidacy anymore, Romney trails in the polls, and 13 corporations have pulled out of ALEC this year.)
Back to Coin vs. Bill, a podcast ostensibly about whether the US should adopt a dollar coin, which to me would be a spectacularly stupid move for many reasons beyond the fiscal, including that my own personal prediction is that we won't have cash at all in 10 years. I recently used some cash -- Sweetie gave me $60 to go to the store and get some stuff, and I found it awkward to not simply swipe a card, and to worry about whether the kid was counting my change correctly, and then having coins jingling in my pocket.
But this isn't about that. This is about the fact that the shift from a dollar bill to a dollar coin is being fought, on both sides, for reasons of money -- but not money from Billionaires For Losers, or whatever SuperPAC people are worried about now.
The Government Accountability Office recommends switching from paper to metal -- doing so even though producing the coins would cost more than producing the bills. The GAO is honest about why they think the government should spend more money making more money: Because it makes money for the government, through "seignorage." Says Planet Money:
In its most recent report,
the GAO recommends switching to coins, which could make $4.4 billion
for the government over 30 years. But the report says the government
benefit does not come from the fact that coins are more cost effective.
Instead the benefit comes from something called "seigniorage."
Seigniorage
is the profit the government makes from having money out in the
economy. More money out there means more profit for the government.
Over time, coins earn more seigniorage for the government, but only because we don't like using them.
A lot more money. That number, in case you glossed over it, was $4,400,000,000, described by people in the know as essentially a tax on change jars. There are 311,591,917 people in the US as I write this, so that's a tax hike of $14.12 on every man, woman, and child in America. Mr F and Mr Bunches, my 5-year-old twins, would pay a tax of nearly $30 on their piggy banks if this plan passes.
The charge for dollar coins is being led by John McCain, whose only remaining principle is "please keep electing me." McCain is joined by Tom Harkin, of Iowa, in that fight, making it a bipartisan plan to tax you. Harkin says it's more efficient to make dollar coins (leaving aside the inefficiency of you not wanting to use them.) NPR suggests it's more than that: McCain's state, Arizona, is home to lots of copper mines, and copper is what's used to produce dollar coins. McCain wouldn't comment on the story. Harkin, meanwhile, has PMX Industries in Cedar Rapids, Iowa - -which makes the sheets used to make the dollar coins. Efficiency indeed!
On the other side is a more traditional lobbying effort: Crane & Co., which makes the paper for dollar bills, invested $70,000 in a lobbying effort and created "Americans For George," a group that mostly exists to have people sign a petition to keep the dollar bill, and to provide links to pro-dollar-bill stories.
PMX Industries, meanwhile, may employ as many as 1000 people in Iowa, a not insignificant number.
So two Senators are backing a bill that would tax every American $14.12, doing so despite the fact that it's an unpopular bill that might end up raising prices and creating a modest amount of inflation, and doing so because that bill directly benefits their states (and their re-election) -- and doing so despite the fact that there are no SuperPACs dominating that fight, that campaign contributions about the issue have mostly been limited to some posters in the Washington, D.C., subway. One can argue about whether or not the bill is a good idea; one can argue about whether Senators have a greater duty to their country or their state (both would be above their re-election, right?)(I know. I'm dreaming.)
But nobody can argue that Citizens United and Vanity Candidates are impacting the fight over a $4,400,000,000 bipartisan tax increase currently being debated.
Whether you're part of the 1% or the 99%, one thing's for sure: You don't want to spend more money than you have to spend, which is why it's nice to find a site that'll help you get some free stuff.
That's why I check out All Free Samples -- not just because I can easily find out how to get free samples by mail 2012 and cool stuff like free movie downloads, but because the site is heads-and-shoulders above other sites like this in terms of the amount of deals they have and the interesting kinds of things they find.
I mean, right now for example they've got information about the Ben & Jerry's Greek Frozen Yogurt sample truck tour, and the cities it's going to to give away free stuff. (Sadly, none near me!) That beats some coupon for yogurt by pointing me to something fun I could do, maybe take the boys to get some free treats on a sunny day. (Again: NOT coming near me. Why not, Ben & Jerry? I'm your biggest fan!)
Also up on their front page? An offer to get a free Swarovski Crystal jar for Mom for Mother's Day from Vaseline -- I have no problem with people getting a discount on the presents they're going to buy anyway, and your mom may like that kind of thing.
All Free Samples, andwww.freecatcher.com, have constantly changing pages full of free things like that. A few minutes each morning, and I'm rolling in free stuff.
Except for free yogurt. That's really bugging me, now.
On Thursday Scramble, I take something from one of my blogs and repost it to all of them. This appeared first on The Best Of Everything,a blog about pop culture and stuff I think about that stuff.
There's an old saying that there are only a few basic storylines which form the essence of every novel, movie, short story, or other literary work.
(Those storylines are: (1) Someone comes to town, (2) someone leaves town, and (3) It's really hard to be the assistant manager of an aquarium.)
I've commented before that if you're going to boil everything down that far, then we only have, say, three different meals, too -- because at its heart, a taco, a steak, and a hamburger all contain some of the same basic ingredients. (And, of course, if you take it down further then everything is composed of pretty much the same elements, which means that if you push the "few basic storylines" to its logical extreme, everything in the universe is identical, and we are all in fact made of stars.
Even Todd Bridges.
But today, I'm not talking about writing. I'm talking about art. Or, as is more apropos for this feature, Art? And, even more apropos of this blog, the kind of Art? that begins with pictures of a naked woman painted to look like Van Gogh's Starry Night:
That is someone named "Jennifer Nicole Lee," and she is posing "topless in body paint" (I use the quotes because that way you know I am being a serious person and not just doing numerous google searches for women in body paint for no good reason) for PETA.
The connection between PETA, and treating animals ethically, and topless-models-wearing-classic-paintings might have escaped you. I missed it, too, which is why I had to spend hour after hour looking at that picture and at this one:
To try to figure it out, but I still wasn't able to. Was Van Gogh noted for his ethical treatment of animals? I wondered. Is PETA saying that remembering not to be cruel to animals is akin to a troubled night in which the entire world seems to be in motion? I asked myself. Could there be any way that I could convince Sweetie to do this to herself? I questioned. (No, was the answer to that last one. No, with a side of no.)
I had nothing but questions -- including "Who is Jennifer Nicole Lee?" which, let's face it, was the least important question.
So I began at PETA's site, trying to figure out what this Jennifer Nicole Lee person, Vincent Van Gogh, and body painting had in common with not being mean to bunnies and other cute animals (because I have never heard PETA standing up for the rights, of, say, jellyfish)
(Has PETA stood up for the rights of jellyfish? A google search suggests no. I know PETA fights animal testing and fur and something about vegetables, too, but I believe that PETA's record on the rights of jellyfish, hissing cockroaches, tarantulas, and okra, which may not be an animal but which is disgusting, is pretty slim; so PETA actually should be "People For the Ethical Treatment Of Animals We All Agree Are Not Gross.)
Anyway, PETA(WAAANG)'s site had no mentions that I could find of Jennifer Nicole Lee or her bodypaint, which was supposed to be part of a PETA(WAAANG) ad campaign. So I searched, instead, for "PETA Starry Night Ad Campaign" and found nothing.
Which kind of put me in a bind because I really felt it very important to get all the facts involved with this almost-Jennifer-Lopez-y looking woman with a Van Gogh painting barely covering her naked body, if only to justify this all to Sweetie, who is getting kind of suspicious of my Google history.
I ended up at Jennifer Nicole Lee's website itself, where I found out she is a fitness expert, who wants you to live "your best life," and that didn't mention PETA(WAAANG) at all, either.
I'd better look to see if anyone is painting naked ladies out there.
And if you don't see how b follows from a, there, well, I feel sorry for you.
The first person my brave/definitely not something to get mad at me about, Sweetie, because it's for research purposes only search led me to was a guy named Danny Setiawan, who has one of those kinds of names that always makes me think it's an anagram. Remember in Lost when Tom Cruise's little brother playing one of the Others arrived at the site of the crash survivors and said his name was "Ethan Rom?" Remember how silly it seemed that anyone would believe that someone was named "Ethan Rom?" I remember that. I also remember thinking "Ethan Rom sounds like an anagram" and despite hating anagrams I am always drawn to them like a moth to flame, almost literally except that there is very little chance that an anagram will end up burning me alive.
Still, you never can tell.
Ethan Rom, by the way, I decided was an anagram for "More Than," which I used early on to convince myself that The Others were some sort of supernatural people and that the island was purgatory. Only later did I realize that was way off and that the island was supposedly real and that Ethan Rom probably stood for Other Man, making it still an anagram but a lot more silly.
"Still this one thing but sillier than you thought," by the way, turns out to be the driving idea behind every single J.J. Abrams movie or TV show ever, which makes me both hope for and dread seeing The Cabin In The Woods.
See what I mean? I kind of like Nathan Fillion, although I won't watch Castle because how many unsolved crimes are there, people? Not that many. But then Nathan Fillion goes and posts that on Twitter, and I now have to have a grudge against him for several valid reasons: (1) It still can be a spoiler, Nathan: I started watching Lost on DVD at the same time as my wife gave birth to twin boys who are now 5 years old. Which meant that for the past 5 years my total free time per week has been about 7 minutes. (Somebody has to buy them a bow and arrow at the Dollar Store and teach them how to use it, after all, and that somebody by God is going to be me. I will not have a nanny teach my boys how to hunt imaginary Dollar Store game.)
(2) You said "you be behind da times." What's that about? You know who sounds funny talking in a fake vernacular? Nobody. -10 points for you on the imaginary point system I invented the other day to be even better at secretly judging people.
(3) Also, I DVRd every episode of Firefly because I thought you were a cool actor and was going to watch them in order but now I find out that you might just tell me what happens because it's more than a year old, and you won't even feel guilty about it? Screw you, Nathan Fillion. Maybe I'll just watch The Big Bang Theory.
So where was I? Oh, yeah: Danny Setiawan and his anagrammatic name and his pictures of naked women.
Danny Setiawan started creating art as early as he was able to make a
mark. It was his way of understanding the world around and inside of
him.
Born and raised in Indonesia, a strategic country that absorbS
influences both from the Eastern and Western societies. Danny absorbed a
wealth of visual vocabulary that ranges from Indonesian traditional
aesthetics such as Batik and Wayang, Japanese anime/manga, to American and European visual styles that were dominant in fashion and entertainment.
Right before the monetary crisis that happened in 1998 hit South East
Asia, Danny was given the opportunity to come to the United States for
higher education. The hardshipS that he experienced under the harsh
financial condition shaped the way Danny sees the world. The image of a
lone struggle contrasted with hope becomes a theme of Danny's art even
today.
That lonely struggle was, for a time, expressed by having naked women pose for him as he painted them into classic paintings, like
Moulin Rouge After Toulouse-Lautrec
and
Dance After Mucha
He also did a Starry Night:
So that seems a popular choice.
All art has a message, right? That message, when I do art, is "Man, this guy cannot do art." But other artists may have a different message. Although Setiawan is available for private parties assuming that you go to the kind of parties where people get naked and get painted, those being the kinds of parties I imagine that I would have wanted to go to at some point in my life only really I didn't, because I'm not a partying kind of guy and I certainly don't want to get naked in front of other people, whether or not I'm going to end up painted as "Naked Guy With Dogs Playing Poker," Setiawan's real message in painting naked women is "Make art relevant to the people again," as he told Brooklyn Exposed:
As a medium, painting is dead, because
people look at it, but the masses are not really engaged. A lot of
people consider the high art thing are people who are really into art
history, go to galleries, or art museums—but I’m not that.
So the relevance thing is this: I want to bring it back to the people.
He also revealed in that interview that he got started in the body painting business when he was in LA and a bunch of women asked him to paint their bodies, so everything you ever imagined about artists, and LA, is absolutely true and that's why you shouldn't study engineering no matter what the amount of your student loan debt is.
Danny Setiawan isn't the only artist trying to make you pay attention to stuff by putting naked women underneath it; I also found an artist named Alexa Meade, who gets around what I assume is the awkwardness of painting on a naked person standing in front of you by mostly painting herself to look like an oil painting. All of these:
are actually real people who were painted to look like paintings; the lower right corner is the artist herself.
Her website says:
Alexa Meade is a 25-year-old artist whose work lies at the intersection of painting, photography, performance, and installation.
Rather than creating representational paintings on a flat canvas,
Alexa Meade creates her representational paintings directly on top of
the physical subjects that she is referencing. When photographed, the
representational painting and the subject being referenced appear to be
one and the same as the 3D space of her painted scenes becomes optically
compressed into a 2D plane.
True story: I once got into a three-way car accident at the intersection of painting, photography, performance, and installation. The other driver? James Franco. Since then, they've installed a Stoplight Of Artistic Critique and a Crossing Guard of Bourgeoisie Indifference to slow things down a bit.
While there's a lot more of what seems like art to me in what Alexa Meade does -- the more you work something, the more artistic it is, right? That's how art works?-- there's certainly a lot less "visibly naked women," so it's hard for me to judge how art her stuff really is. What she does (in her own words, again) is:
In my current work, I construct and then photograph
ephemeral installation sets that feature an assemblage of found objects
and live models, which I have covered in layers of acrylic paint. I
paint the surfaces of the human subjects, the material objects, and the
architecture of the installations so as to collapse the subject,
foreground, and background into one continuous plane. I present my
ephemeral portrait/performances as both live, interactive installations
as well as permanent photographic indices of these experiences.
"There is no such thing as a flat surface." Give it some thought and
you will realise that this somewhat unusual statement is nothing but a
simple truth – everything that we usually consider to be flat turns out
to be a three-dimensional relief when sufficiently magnified. A flat
surface is an illusion, a mere misapprehension – one that illustrates
perfectly the fact that the world around us is often completely
different than we imagine.
And that thought is best translated to the masses by having a Group of Obama walk around a hill while a guy throws fire at them.
The verdict: ART. This trend has all the essential ingredients of art: Naked people, and... and... where was I? I got distracted there.
How hot is too hot when you're the family values party? Wait, excuse me, I forgot to put the air quotes around that: "family values" party. That gets the proper level of irony involved when a political party says it's for the family but really is for the families of millionaires, as the GOP does these days, and irony is where it's at today as we examine the case studies of two hot ("hot"?) young GOP operatives whose fortunes are moving in different directions.
First up, Ciara Matthews:
Ciara recently made headlines for having been a former Hooters girl (as pictured above). Ciara was recently profiled in The Capital Times (including the requisite crazy-eyed Republican photo: why is it that the farther out there a Republican is, the more weirding-out their eyes are? Exhibit A: Rick Scott of Florida:
So Ciara was a Hooters girl but that didn't stop her from posing provocatively in her short shorts or becoming the campaign spokeswoman for Wisconsin Governor Scott ("Patsy") Walker's Avoid Recall campaign, a campaign Walker appears to be waging in Illinois, New York and other states; does he know he's the governor of Wisconsin?
Ciara presumably knows lots of fun facts like that -- she's the campaign spokesperson, after all, and one of her first tasks was trying to explain to the press why it wasn't a big story that she used to sell PG-13 rated sexy dreams and wings (wings, by the way, are a way of selling you garbage at a profit).
In true GOP fashion, Ciara dismissed the claim she used to be a Hooters waitress as "tabloid rumors," because the truth becomes a tabloid rumor when you are a GOP operative, and vice versa.
For the record, I'm in favor of Hooters -- not because of the wings (I don't eat garbage) and not because I even go there. I just support people's right to look at sexy women if they choose, unlike the GOP, but the Republicans may be changing, as they've got another Hooters girl holding office:
That's Julia Hurley, a Republican in the Tennessee House of Representatives, and I bet she had no trouble getting volunteers. (Get it? Because Tennessee is the volunteer state... never mind.) Julia credits Hooters with giving her the drive to succeed, I assume because those shorts don't look all that comfortable and she probably wanted to get into a job where she could just let herself go, you know what I mean?
So Hooters-waitressing is clearly the inside track to the Republican Inner Circle (but not in the way you'd guessed). What level of hotness will get you disqualified from the GOP's ranks?
For those who are really interested in conservative politics, Ms. Melder is a Senate assistant in Arkansas, worked on a Republican gubernatorial campaign, and can be seen at a dance party here:
It's been a while since I mentioned the Geek Toys 2012 and other cool stuff at Geek Alerts, but that's not for lack of checking up on the site.
Geek Alerts, you'll no doubt remember, is the website I bookmarked to keep track of cool stuff I want to buy. In theory, it is stuff I want to buy for other people, but who am I kidding? Not myself; that's very tough to do because I am a smart cookie. No, I'm mostly fooling Sweetie, who says stuff like "Why are you looking at that website?" and then when I answer "No reason, really," she won't get suspicious and realize that I've found a robotic ball I can control with my smart phone (as shown at the left, there.)
See? That's the kind of stuff the internet should be used for: justifying my belief that robotics ought to be focusing on robots that actually work (like sphere shaped ones) while also getting me cooler toys.
Geek Alerts is good for more than just toys, of course: right now you can get promotional stuff and coupons, like Petsmart coupons for those of you who've got a pet (I don't; who has time? I've got robots to play with/control as my personal army), or, if you're into buying stuff, you can get an Amazon promotional code that'll save you money on the website where, let's face it, you buy pretty much everything these days.
The New Yorker recently did a story about The Daily Mail, which they said is England's newspaper equivalent of our FOX News -- in England, the story said, television shows are staid, stuffy affairs while the newspapers are raucous shoutfests.
That was enough to get me to subscribe to the Mail Online for my phone app (the US version); the site is the world's most popular. It was also enough to get me to listen to this song:
That's The Daily Mail Song,and it presents a counterpoint to this lead-in that The New Yorker gave the Mail:
The Mail is the most powerful newspaper in Great Britain. A
middle-market tabloid, with a daily readership of four and a half
million, it reaches four times as many people as the Guardian, while being taken more seriously than the one paper that outsells it, the Sun. In January, its Web arm, Mail Online, surpassed that of the New York Times as the most visited newspaper site in the world, drawing fifty-two million unique visitors a month. The Mail’s closest
analogue in the American media is perhaps Fox News. In Britain, unlike
in the United States, television tends to be a dignified affair, while
print is berserk and shouty. The Mail is like Fox in the sense
that it speaks to, and for, the married, car-driving, homeowning,
conservative-voting suburbanite, but it is unlike Fox in that it is not
slavishly approving of any political party.
One editor told me, “The
paper’s defining ideology is that Britain has gone to the dogs.” Nor is
the Mail easy to resist. Last year, its lawyers shut down a proxy
site that allowed liberals to browse Mail Online without bumping up its
traffic.
I'm on record as saying that we shouldn't pretend newspapers and reporters and television shows don't have biases. A recent Freakonomics, where they've seem to sort of run out of ideas, found that while the media may be biased, it's primary driving force is selling things to people, which seems like a remarkable idea for about one second, until you remember that newspapers are commodities, like ice cream cones or aspirin -- and so they push political views subtly (or not so...) to sell papers to you because that's how they make money. If an ice cream company could sell you something by pushing a political view, it would likely do so, too...
...and nobody would think anything of it.
Most people will say "Sure, but newspapers are different because we rely on them to bring us the news and must trust what they say," but must we, really? And can't we, if they admit they're biased? Trust, in that sense, becomes a part of the mixture they are selling us -- you will consume more news from a source you find trustworthy (one hopes) than from one you disbelieve.
And, if it's trusting in honesty you're after, how about beginning with "honesty about having a bias?" Newspapers that begin with a big lie (we don't have a bias) can't necessarily be trusted to not have lots of little lies.
Also, since it's nearly tax time here, I thought I'd include another Dan & Dan song that seems more topical:
It's been about two years now since my last speeding ticket -- and I STILL worry.
I have a tendency to speed. Not by a lot, but by enough to be passing people. If I'm not passing people, I don't feel like I'm getting anywhere. To me, driving without passing people feels like I'm driving on a treadmill.
Which is how I get most of my speeding tickets -- because people will be doing the speed limit, like suckers, and I have to pass them because I'm near-completely-insane, and so I will do, say, 37 in a 30 zone and get pulled over.
Enough of that, and I end up paying higher insurance premiums because they feel (for some weird reason) that I'm a higher risk. And so for two years I've had to suck it up and do the speed limit.
Until I found out about what Best Radar Detectors said is the Best Radar Detector out there.
I don't know squat about radar detectors. But I found a website that does, and can tell me what the Best Radar Detector on the market is at the moment, and after I learned that, I started seeing a way out of this speed-limit-imposed purgatory that I've been in for two years.
A radar detector would let me get back to doing what I want to do -- which is go slightly faster than you -- without the same risk of getting speeding tickets, which ends up costing me too much in tickets and premiums and in telling Sweetie I got another ticket, which is probably the worst punishment of all because then she lords it over me how she didn't get any tickets, ever. In her life.
Of course, she's a hot woman. So there's a reason she didn't get tickets.
When the Citizens' Finance case was decided, it began an onslaught of people crying doom and gloom about our political system, with most people (on either side of the aisle, as they say) claiming that unfettered spending would distort democracy.
The idea is that with unlimited, potentially anonymous contributions to SuperPACs which are essentially independent contractors for political candidates, elections can be bought and candidates who don't really represent the will of the people will find themselves being nominated, and winning. We'll have a president who was chosen by a few rich people, or even one billionaire, seems to be the fear.
There are lots of problems with that line of thinking, one of the first being that it assumes people's opinions can be swayed by political advertising. It maybe cannot, not in the way that people think. In a 1999 Stanford University paper about the effects of political advertising on commercial advertising, two researchers noted that voting is typically "expressive," rather than "instrumental," meaning that when people vote they usually vote to express their affiliations rather than achieve a goal. The paper sought to examine the ways political advertising can alter the outcomes of elections, and began with the assumption that because political views are relatively fixed, the goal of advertising was to suppress voter turnout for your rivals rather than increase your own votes.
That idea presaged George Worst President Ever Bush's energize the base strategies put into place by Karl Rove -- the idea in Rove's mind being that you don't need to appeal to moderates the way Clinton had if you instead can just get more of your people to come vote, which you can do not just by appealing to their own concerns but by demonizing your opponent, which is part of why Obama has to be painted by Republicans as a Kenyan Socialist 1% Sympathizer: He's for the rich! And the socialists! And Scary Africans! And he's Muslim! Did we forget that? Now go vote for the other guy who might not be great but he won't make you read the Koran to rich people in a government-run hospital!
So what did the study, 13 years ago, which you've never heard about, conclude?
A couple of things. First, it found that people in general rated political ads as less reliable than commercial advertisements. Interestingly, and, second, the studies noted that the more political ads people saw, the more they liked commercial ads and the less they liked political ads. The effect apparently existed because people distrusted the political ads so much (and especially disliked the negative ads.) The effect was more pronounced on the higher profile races -- political ads for presidential campaigns created a larger trust-gap than other types of political ads.
So what does that mean? The study didn't talk about the effects of political ads versus political ads, but at least one conclusion I think can be drawn from that comparison is that the effect of political ads is overstated. While commercials can create demand out of nowhere (think ring around the collar) that effect is rare -- ads exist primarily to cause you to choose one option over another -- one type of beer versus the other, or a hamburger instead of a pizza, when you're hungry.
With people almost automatically distrusting political ads so much so that consumer ads seem more credible and likeable by comparison, the idea that a political ad could make you choose this candidate over that candidate seems pretty tenuous, doesn't it? But remember, the paper didn't examine whether ads can actually serve simply to suppress votes; consider, as an comparison, what might happen if McDonald's, instead of trying to get you to choose its burgers over Burger King's, decided to try to get you to stay home, so that Burger King's sales would go down while theirs stayed the same?
Is that the idea behind political ads, as the paper suggested but didn't study? I'm not sure -- if political ads are so distrusted that they can't be relied upon to make you choose Romney over Santorum, why would they convince you to stay home instead of voting?
And what if the negative ads convince you to go vote, instead? In one 2002 paper, two researchers suggested that negative ads create a "stimulation effect," making voters go vote in higher numbers. Other papers have suggested this effect is achieved primarily in highly-partisan voters, suppressing independents and moderates who may be turned off by the negativity.
But it's not clear why people don't vote -- especially independents and moderates, who may not feel strongly enough about any issue to care much about the outcome. In 2008, one report said that it was Republicans who didn't turn out to vote, which may have resulted in Obama's election because Obama supporters were highly motivated, while Republicans weren't thrilled with McCain/Palin. I've suggested in the past that Scott "Patsy" Walker's win in 2010 in Wisconsin was not because more people liked him but because Democrats weren't excited about their candidate and stayed home, and voter turnout numbers support that.
Which brings us to Rick Santorum: Santorum gained most of his financial support after a surprising, stronger-than-expected showing in Iowa.
Santorum's support primarily came from the "Red, White And Blue Fund," which spent $3,000,000 in one month alone to support his campaign (that month, Romney groups spent $9,900,000 on ads that month.) Santorum's contributions to his campaign itself picked up steam only after wins, suggesting that the reason people were giving him money is because they thought he could win - -not giving him money to turn him into a winner.
That $3,000,000-to-$9,900,000 spending spread was in February and March of this year. During that time, neither Romney nor Santorum showed a decisive edge. Santorum's biggest win over Romney came in Kansas on March 10, with Santorum winning by 30 percentage points... but Romney didn't bother competing much there.
In Alabama, Romney and his SuperPAC aired 2,377 ads shortly before the primaries. Santorum's campaign aired none; his SuperPAC aired 282. Santorum beat Romney by 5 percentage points.
Despite that, there are still stories written about how Santorum's lack of money caused him to drop out. Which is to say: There are still people who believe that even though Santorum was outspent 10-1 in Alabama but still won, and even though studies show that negative ads can increase voter turnout among partisans but for some reason many Republican primaries have lower-than-usual voter turnout, and even though Santorum was backed my millionaires if not billionaires, there are still people who want to believe that money is what drives political campaigns, despite ample evidence to the contrary.
They want to believe that despite the fact that Romney has millions, but is not beloved by Republicans -- money can't buy me love, right? Maybe it's not money; maybe it's that Santorum's angry medieval thinking didn't appeal to as many Republicans as the party "base" would like to think, and maybe it's that Republicans aren't all that excited about having a choice between a man with virtually no political experience and Etch-A-Sketch views and a man who would chain women in the kitchen.
The rich haven't been able to force anyone to like either Romney or Santorum; why would we think that would change come November?
What with the economy still grinding along in hopes that someday someone
will spend some money again, it's easy to think to yourself "I'm never
going to borrow any money ever because that way I can't get into
trouble."
That might not be the best solution to your own personal financial
concerns, though. You may need to get a new car, or upgrade your
housing, or refinance your loan, or possibly, you might want a credit
card.
I know, I know: you're thinking 'Nope, no way, I'm not going to borrow
money because that's stupid, I'm going to be like those Flemish people
who never had credit and their civilization lasted 100s of years.' (I
just now made that up, so it's weird that you and I both thought that
same thing.)
But trust me: you might want to borrow money again someday, and when you
do, you'll want to do it SMART -- like by making sure you're getting
the best possible interest rates on your loan.
Here's how most people choose their credit cards now: filling out an
application they were mailed or got at the ballpark. (Really? Most
people DO NOT do it that way? It's just me?) But those same people (me)
could instead go and check out loan rates at sunrisefinance.com
and quickly search through a variety of credit card offers to find the
card that's right for them. Maybe they want rewards, or cash back, or
no interest balance transfers -- whatever special treatment you want,
sorting through the credit card companies in advance can be a smart
move.
Or car loans -- how many of you simply rely on the dealer to find you
the best loan? (I'm holding up my hand.) Why do that? The dealer
doesn't care -- they're not lending you the money, they just want to get
paid. So instead of going into a dealership, picking a car, and then
asking them to find you a loan, you could go to the dealer having first
FOUND A LOAN on Sunrise Finance, so you know exactly how much you'll be
paying and how much you can spend.
Nice, right? I thought so.
So don't just swear off borrowing money forever. If you have to borrow,
borrow smarter.
I'm going to start, as soon as I can, a series of posts about the influence of money in politics -- which is far smaller than many people expect, and also, where it DOES have influence, money has that power in ways you don't expect and because, in part, of YOU.
Yep: point a finger at money in politics, and you'll have four fingers pointing right back at you, all of them saying "Why didn't you get more information before you voted, so you wouldn't have to rely on faulty press reports and attack ads to form an opinion?"
Your fingers are right: you should be learning more, and luckily for us we have access to a wealth of information right here... at your fingertips. (See what I did there?)
Want to learn about the claims regarding Mitt Romney Job Creation and his ability to do that? That link will send you to a site that points out that Massachusetts was 47th in the nation during the time he governed us. He may run the country like a business -- but if it's a business that doesn't do well, what good is that?
You could also learn the facts about Obama and his record on debts and revenues -- as well as how the Affordable Care Act might impact the federal budget (not as bad as you think.) Obama does better than Bush (a/k/a Worst President Ever) on those issues.
And that brings us totaxes, and the fact that most people act stupidly about them. Mitt, if you follow that link, talks about when we didn't punish the rich by taxing them -- but doesn't note that top tax rates are about the lowest they've ever been, ever.
When most people say money in politics, they mean advertising spending. They're wrong to focus on that. Even as people gripe about the influence of SuperPACs (SuperPACs that could not keep any candidate afloat for very long) and misunderstand why that influence is a good thing, they forget that ads only work if you're not informed. When I see an ad, I know the facts that are often contradicting the ad claims.
So between now and the general election, I'll be looking at, periodically, the actual way money affects politics, reading Citizens United to you, and examining how you're all wrong about money, and, where you're right, why it's your fault.
Chuck Schumer, who just last Sunday was putting 1/100 of the power of the United States Senate behind stamping out a complete nonproblem (quick: name an employer you know who actually asked for a Facebook password. Yeah, I thought so), this Sunday is reported to have dropped that quest like the non-hot-potato it no longer was
... got a little lost in the negatives there, as can happen...
...in favor of using his office to do pretty much as little as possible while garnering news coverage again this Sunday.
And today, SUCCESS! Corporal Leavey has her dog, the dog is retired, and everyone is happy!
Well, almost everyone, but we'll get to that.
When this story first came on, and I was being derisive about it (as happens), Sweetie told me that I have no heart.
To which I said "People before pets." But we'll get to that, too.
Because first, I want to point out that the news story I saw on the tee-vee didn't point out that Corporal Leavey was in the process of getting her dog already, but that the approval was "rigorous" because of the kind of training those dogs have. So Senator Small Time Charlie just moved things along.
But more importantly, as I said, people before pets.
While Small Time Charlie was helping Megan get her dog, twenty-one U.S. soldiers died while on duty in our stupid war in Afghanistan. That's almost one a day.
You can read about them all here. I suggest someone from Chuck's office click that link, especially as some of those guys were from New York.
They held a little ceremony retiring Corporal Leavey's dog. I bet it made for some cute news coverage this morning. You know what you didn't see on the news this morning, or any of the last 21 days?
Chuck Schumer, a Senator from New York, last came across my radar when he stood up to Big Luggage by insisting that you be taxed on the price airlines charge you to transport your luggage as well as you across the country.
It's been two years since then, and lots of stuff has happened -- Citizens United, Obamacare... um... other stuff... and I didn't hear much about Senator Schumer until recently, when he took a strong stand in favor of you not having to let your employers have unfettered access to those darling cat photos you posted over the weekend:
Employers may be breaking federal law by requiring job seekers to turn over their Facebook passwords, two U.S. Senators said.
Senators Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) are
asking the feds to investigate bosses’ practice of asking for passwords
to troll through would-be workers’ private information.
"An
employer shouldn't be allowed into that almost sacred domain of things
you just share with your five best friends, or your spouse or your
child," Schumer said Sunday.
"You shouldn't be required to give up your private life just to get a job."
Will that be the end of Chuck Schumer's noble quest to find the smallest possible public issue on which he can do the least amount of work but still somehow stay in the public eye? Don't bet on it -- you know those gumball machines they still have where you can get a tiny football helmet?
I never get the San Francisco 49ers, and once word of that gets out, Schumer is going to be all over it.
