Dakota Today

*** John Edwards

At one time I was very interested in John Edwards as a presidential candidate even if I believed Dr. Howard Dean was the best candidate for several election cycles.  Edwards was certainly aware of the problems facing the unrich and probably generated fear in the hearts of those with obscene profits in their pockets.  Unfortunately, Edwards could not keep his own pants on and got into an unfortunate and disgusting entanglement..not with his wife.

Despite that, I have never believed that his disgusting personal behavior was justification for a government political prosecution campaign that required something like 40 government lawyers diverted from anything important to scratch in the dirt as if looking for cat shit.  This has been a tremendous waste of taxpayers money.  It seemed unwarranted from day one, but after Citizen's United SCOTUS decision it seemed ever more insignificant and inappropriate.

Money contributed to Edwards campaign and also given to him for personal uses pales into insignificance and never influenced legislation or government policy unlike the $400,000,000 or so that insurance, fossil fuels, and financial interests have kicked under the doors of our Congress critters.  Ruth Marcus hits this nail squarely on the head.

Ruth Marcus "Is John Edwards a criminal? May 15 Washington Post

Another writer writer believes the prosecution springs from Puritanism inappropriately injected into governance.  John Edwards, Victim of Political Puritanism USA Today--Dwayne Wickham

I suspect all of the above might be factors, but also believe that John Edwards was viewed as a serious threat to the very, very rich and their tax breaks and slop trough of federal money.  His fall from virtue has been a good excuse for making his life hell and threatening him with prison for something that was never intended to be covered by campaign contribution restrictions.

I have little remaining respect for Edwards as a man or a politician, but I also do not believe his indescretion warrants the equivalent of  burning at the stake by zealous lawyers doing the work the big corporations could not do. Communication companies amplified Howard Dean's scream into a reason to keep him from raining on their parade, but that is another story.

*** Stay tuned even if Edwards always seemed just a bit too smooth to you--- Doug Wiken

 

*** Science Friday has pro and con on Thorium as Nuclear fuel

This afternoon (May 4, 2012) SDPB radio had on Science Friday with Ira Flatow.  One of the topics discussed was thorium as a nuclear power source.  You will notice links there to the program protagonists on the issue--- Richard Martin and Arjun Makhijani.

I assume the primary impetus for the program today was the new book by Richard Martin titled "SuperFuel: Thorium, The Green Energy Source at Amazon Books..." 

Opposition to the idea of Thorium as an ideal fuel came from Arjun Makhijani of The Institute for Energy and Environmental Research 

The program this afternoon gave the impression at least that the IEER organization opposes all nuclear energy.  I may be wrong about that however.  One of their pdf publications does specifically address the issue as Thorium No Panacea orIdeal Fuel         

I have been interested in this issue for sometime.  I may have heard about it first on another Science Friday a couple years ago or read it in WIRED Magazine.  Such an article is  Uranium is So Last Century.    

It may be that Thorium is not an ideal fuel, but then the question becomes "Is there actually any "ideal" fuel?"  Wind and solar might fit into an ideal category, but getting enough of that going is not all that simple and might take significant time. Super-insulated energy efficient building is something significant as well and that can be done starting tomorrow.  We hear "jobs, jobs" noise from both parties.  New super-insulated housing and retrofitting could get the construction industry going again and also solve part of our energy problem and also in the process put a dent in global warming consequent to human economic behavior.

Anyway, these links offer some information that I think is well worth your time.  We need to make our real "war" effort the complete separation of the US from foreign fossil fuels. Thorium power may not be ideal, but it may be the best interim solution. I will put some more information together on that idea with more detail.  I have ordered the book by Richard Martin, but it will not arrive for a week or two.

Our political critters need to stop licking the butts of bucaneer bankers and bunco brokers and get truly serious about serious issues that have consequences for everyday people even if they don't directly benefit the plutocrats and the 0.01 percent of our population so very, very rich that their wives might be wearing $990 TeeShirts.       

*** Stay tuned ..you can know more even if your tee shirts never cost more than $9.90 including tax--- Doug Wiken

 

 

 

*** Marion Mike Rounds contemplates a run for the US Senate.

All South Dakota voters should be so excited they can hardly hold their water.  Mike Rounds is considering a run for the US Senate.  He will make up his minds next Fall.  How can we wait without busting our seams in anticipation of his momentous decision?

The insurance agent includes some fine print in his unannouncment.  He will NOT sign the idiotic Grover Norquist pledge that retrograde Republicans Thune and Noem have signed.  I guess that bit of fine print is supposed to make Rounds look like a moderate.

I have never been impressed with Tim Johnson as a US Senator or anything else.  Johnson is not stupid or ignorant, but he has not made a persuasive case for any remotely controversial idea in his whole life as far as I know.  (If he did venture close to a serious issue, it was his labeling of Republican strident mythologists as "Taliban Republicans" and then waltzed away from that rather than giving examples.)  He may have displayed courage in the face of nearly debilitating health problems (repairs paid for by US taxpayers), but I doubt any Profiles in Political Courage will include Johnson as a prairie statesman.  The banks and insurance companies he has pandered to might want to put up a brass bust of him in their lobbies however.

Despite all that, if Johnson is a tool of the special interests (see his statements on Glass-Stegall for example), Rounds would make Johnson look like piker panderer.  Just what the US does not need is an integral part of the insurance industry in Congress.  Nor do we need somebody silly enough to build a house on a river bottom literally inches above the low water mark of the Missouri below Oahe.

Another careful viewer of SD politics wondered aloud if Rounds was just trying to determine how many family members he could put into federal jobs before he got really serious.  Nothing quite like a Republican who shuts down a library and converts it into space for more bureaucrats.  I don't know if any of his family ended up in that building or not, but it would not be a big surprise.  The answer won't however be found in the dispersed resource collections spread all over South Dakota.

*** Stay tuned even if you haven't yet started holding your breath in breathless anticipation of another Rounds campaign.--- Doug Wiken

 

 

*** Earthly confluence

Really not much of a confluence, but somewhat interesting anyway.  This morning I got an Esquire magazine and read the politics column on page 80 of the May issue. The conclusion of the article laid heavy responsibility on Democrats to save the country from current GOP insanity.

The Democratic party has an obligation to beat the Republican party so badly, over and over again, that rationality once again becomes a quality to be desired. It must be done by persuading the country of this simple fact. It cannot be done by reasoning with the Republicans, because the next two generations of them are too far gone. The state legislators now passing all manner of crazy laws represent the next generation of national Republican leaders. They are proudly unknowing. They are certain, because it is impossible.

Read the whole column here Esquire Democrats' Duty: Bring Back the GOP from Crazy by Charles P. Pierce.  Of course I like that because I have probably written something too similar for several years..only more in the injunction form of "Send the GOP howling in the Wilderness for the next 50 years.".

And, Pierce wrote a paragraph that fit right in with PBS  "Earth: The Operator's Manual today on SDPB-TV

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the Republican party, root and branch, from its deepest grass roots to its highest levels, has become completely demented. This does not mean that it is incapable of winning elections; on the contrary, the 2010 midterms, as well as the statewide elections around the country, ushered in a class of politicians so thoroughly dedicated to turning nonsense into public policy that future historians are going to marvel at our ability to survive what we wrought upon ourselves. It is now impossible to become an elected Republican politician in this country if, for example, you believe in the overwhelming scientific consensus that exists behind the concept of anthropogenic global warming. Just recently, birth control, an issue most people thought pretty well had been settled in the 1960s, became yet another litmus test for Republican candidates, as did the Keystone XL pipeline, to which every Republican presidential candidate pledged unyielding fealty despite the fact that several prairie Republicans and an army of conservative farmers and ranchers are scared to death of the thing. ( And another link not in above text to Pierce concerning unnecessary voter ID restrictions. )

The PBS "Earth Manual" seemed at least to make a rather scientific case that man-made factors have greatly influenced our climate..which Pierce calls "The concept of anthropogenic global warming".   Buy the DVD at PBS Store.

Years ago in another context, the slogan was "Stop the Insanity".  That phrase applies well to the current collection of retrograde Republicans including John Thune, Kristi Noem, Willard "Mitt" Romney, Sarah Palin, ...oh, and sadly the list could go on and on.

The current GOP party view of their ideal American can be summed up by "Government of the Patriots, by the theocrats and hack Mythologists, and for the Plutocrats.".

Sorry (well not really) if this did not meet your high standards for "confluence".

*** Stay tuned. There is enough GOP insanity to write a modern bible--- Doug Wiken

 

 

 

*** The new guns and butter debate

[[[ Note of April 18, 2012.  John, ever vigilant, noted a serious error in my math regarding the Romney fortune.  My per second calculated income is off by a factor of 60.  The aprox "$40 per second" should be "$40 per minute" instead.  Actual per second income would be something like "67 cents per second" before taxes.  Thanks John, and I hope that nobody has used those erroneous numbers in a way that might embarass them as much as I am. The entry is corrected below-- Doug Wiken ]]]]

Hillary Rosen makes a too broad statement without a necessary qualifier for those unable to grasp her actual intent and the GOP mighty Wurlitzer mythology mill goes ballistic.  Democrats run like rabbits aiding the GOP misinterpretation of Rosen.  Obama says what the hell, let's toss Hillary Rosen under the bus and the campaigns roll along.

The national GOP and the intentioanlly blind, reality-deprived South Dakota Republicans following them have so few actual issues they fire up another pseudo issue...Hillary Rosen deprecates working women..who mostly work both in home and out of home. Did she really do that?

What Hillary Rosen was trying so inelegantly to say was that Ann Romney has no experience remotely like that of most working women.  Ann Romney says she "made a choice to stay home and do the hard work of raising 5 boys."  The problem with that is not the hard work, but that she actually had to made a choice. She did not have to make a choice. 

Most women working also have not been able to make a choice.  They have one choice-- work in their home raising a family and work outside their home as well so they can stay alive.  South Dakota has one of the highest percentages of working women in the US. 

Just a few minutes ago (10:35 PM CDT, Monday April 16, 2012), Romney and Ann were on ABC-TV answering questions about this tempest in a teacup..or A,B, C cup for that matter.  Ann Romney said she was thrilled to be discussing this issue which she then defined as women being interested in the deficit.  That is interesting spin that again indicates their total disconnect from the real world.

Remember that Romney is getting $57,000 per day from investments.  That is about $2375 per hour or about forty bucks per minute or 67 cents per second (note the correction).  Three minutes elapse and Ann Romney has enough money to buy family groceries for a week or two.  That is not the situation for 99.99 percent of the population including both men and women.  The only choice Ann Romney has to make is not between working inside the home and outside the home or just inside the home, it is more like how much caviar they should order.

And, what are those GOP congress critters doing about all this?  Well, they are pandering to the NRA and the corporations behind ALEC and the TEA party.  These GOP congress critters have their and your priorities turned upside down. Here is the new guns and butter question: do you need a concealed weapon to get your groceries, or do you need fair pay for your work in order to keep your family fed and clothed? 

Will cutting taxes on the 0.01 percent of the very richest make your life better or just increase the deficit that really, really, really  concerns housewife Ann Romney every time she fries an egg or washes a plate?  Do you smell the stink of class warfare when you hear Obama discuss the "Buffet rule", or do you smell it when you hear GOP laying seige on the middle class and advocating  for corporations, buccaneering bankers, and bunko brokers claiming the richest one percent should not pay taxes because they stimulate they economy.?.  And just to make that side clear, poor undeseriving people should never, ever have any valid reason to envy the very, very rich or question the social inequality..

*** Stay tuned even if groceries or health care are never concerns of yours--- Doug Wiken

 

 

*** Reality bites SCOTUS conservatives and the healthcare only for the rich mythology

Paul Begala has been a Democratic operative of some variety and now writes a politics column for Newsweek magazine.  In the April 9, 2012 issue he dumps in an interesting fact in a column which argues that "the Founding Fathers lived in the real world, not the rarefied world of bloodless abstractions preferred by the court's right-wing majority."  Begala might better have used "factless mythology" than "abstractions".

But here is the fact. A woman named Mary Brown, who was a small businesswoman, filed the initial lawsuit asserting her right not to buy health insurance which has turned into a case for the SCOTUS as Karen Harned, of the NFIB legal center, said two years ago when NFIB filed the lawsuit on Brown's behalf.  But, Brown is no longer named as a plaintiff.

Why drop Mary Brown from the suit?  Well she got very sick.  The bills rolled in.  Without health insurance, she went bankrupt.  She had to shutdown her auto-repair shop.  She stiffed her doctors and hospital leaving her uncovered bills for those of us who pick up the tab for the parasites who generate uncompensated care bills.  Begala says that  such freeriders or freeloaders tack on about $1,017 per year to your health insurance costs if you are responsible and do your best to cover your own health care by buying health insurance.

Showing his disconnect from the real world, Justice Alito (Who collects about $213,000 each year from taxpayers) said, A thousand bucks a year "is a very small part of what the mandate is doing".  There are two obvious problems with that. For many of us, making a $1000 gift each year to freeloaders is a big aggravation added to the fact we pay the most in the world for less than the best medical system.  The other problem with that statement is that the mandate is not doing anything.  It has not happened yet.  The court is meddling in a premptive war against the middle class as misplaced and arrogantly ignorant as another premptive war that sent our military on a fool's errand chasing non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Read Begala's original article to increase your blood pressure a bit more. A similar perspective is available at Truthdig.com by Editor Robert Scheer March 29, 20112

Scheer's column was also in the Rapid City Journal snail mail version Tuesday April 3, 2012 Opinion page A5.

As indicated by both these columns, we and Barack Obama would have been better off with the Medicare for all option pushed months ago by George McGovern.  McGovern has more foresight than a couple hundred Repubican retrogressives spewing mythology.

** Stay tuned, but don't try to use as a tax deduction $1,027 of your health insurance premiums as a donation to the poor--- Doug Wiken

 

*** Content farms, churnalism, agnotology and information diet

This afternoon NPR broadcast an interview with author Clay Johnson who has written THE INFORMATION DIET, A case for Conscious Consumption.  The discussion involved a few terms, neologisms, and other ideas I was at least somewhat unaware.  Reviews of Johnson's book at Amazon are a mixed bag.  Some find it very interesting, others "too fat" and with a lot of padding between ideas.  Anyway, I suspect it is a book journalists and the rest of us might want to purchase.

Some of the ideas in the discussion today follow.  His kind of model relates to a poor diet of food and drink which is not good for the eater and drinker...only he relates that to the dangers to information content consumers or idea eaters.  He is not apparently saying that the glut of information is intrinsically bad, it may in fact be good.  He urges using discretion on consumption however.  He noted that both FoxNews and MSNBC should probably be mostly ignored by a dieting information consumer.  His reasoning is that they provide information that is so agreeable to viewers that it distorts or prevents a real view of reality.

He noted a story I mentioned here in a previous post.  That concerns a study that showed conservatives holding fallacious ideas or mythology when exposed to genuine facts that were inconsistent with their mythology, they did not dump the fallacious ideas or concepts; rather, they held those views even more strongly despite incontovertible facts in opposition.

Another idea discussed is Churnalism.    This involves repetition of stories and press releases churned out often purely for propaganda or publicity purposes by media copying the ideas as if they are original news.   This information and disinformation can also be spread all over from content farms.   These may be sites designed to put out a lot of information designed to attract hits for the related ads on the sites.

Corporations and special interests contribute to Agnotology, essentially the opposite of epistemology.   Agnatology is the study of ignorance.  Epistemology the study of knowledge.A classic example of corporations and agnatology concerned the disinformation campaigns of tobacco companies when they dumped out mixtures of valid research results and complete falsehoods in the hope of confusing the public on issues of government regulation of tobacco products.  The apparent start of the "Agnology" idea.

I suspect seeing all the misleading mixtures of information and disinformation being presented in support of the XL pipeline, we may have another good example right here in good old South Dakota.  Newspapers take fullpage ads from the pipeline companies and follow them up with editorials filled with half-truths and irrelevant truth or facts supporting the pipeline.  These editiorials often ignore the obvious problems.  TV ads apparently serve the same purpose only those seem only to slightly influence news coverage..most often by ignoring the opponents.

Also discussed was filter failure.  This might be suggested by editors and others dumping information as if from a fire hose rather than from a filtered faucet and organized cupfuls...or it might be our own unbalanced glutonous search for information from everywhere.

You might also read my note at the top of the page regarding a foolish journalistic consistency.  Johnson noted that a balance between sense and nonsense is "news from nowhere".

All this suggests according to Clay Johnson that Attention Fitness and a good information diet are difficult but necessary.  Democracy can be irrelevant if voters and politicians are unable to separate ignorance and mythology from facts and reality.

I am not endorsing the books and sites below.  I don't really know enough about them, but they may be interesting to those who have managed to read this far.

The Information Diet Site.    The Information Diet Book at Amazon.

 Books on Agnotology.

Google searchs of any of the above terms and concepts will churn up a firehose of information.  Drink carefully.

Sadly, it appears that if we take Johnson seriously, readers here may want to check out Steve Sibson's site as well, or neither his nor mine..  If you find a good information site relating to South Dakota and national issues that is honestly filtered in an unbiased way, let me know.  I am not only interested in the idea that others have attention fitness, but also that I make serious attempts in that direction and toward a balanced information diet for all of us..

{Note of Mon, Mar 26, 2012:  Apparently the Proctor information and "agnotology, agnotonomie, etc" issues burst forth last year.  Following are links to a few blogs and sites with extended comments the value of which I am unsure, but which definitely show there are those who find "agnotology" label useful,  those who find their current religion or ideology sacrosanct and the label agnolology a form of evil.  And also those who are ambivalent about the value of the idea:   CNN-In the Arena--Robert Proctor , Judith Curry--Climate, Etc Blog Post followed by 281 comments,  Crooked Timber Site Agnotology and Santa Clause and over 100 comments,  and if that isn't enough, check the AOL search that turned up these links and also this post here at DT.  Enough already.]]]

*** Stay tuned even if you find Dakota Today churning and contributing to Agnatology now and then--- Doug Wiken

*** About that crushed ice

SDPB2 is running Nova-- Extreme Ice.  It concerns attempts to scientifically measure the melting of arctic ice. 

Got me thinking that we are burning fossil fuels which generate  waste products which may be  factors in the arctic and antarctic ice melting so that we can generate electricity used to  keep food cold and make ice cubes and crushed ice.  Some kind of irony someplace in that.

Also a bit ironical is that politicians in bed with the fossil fuels industries claim to be "conservatives" but may in fact be part of wasting our earth and environment.

Today however we are using some of those fossil fuels to keep warm.  A chilly rain and fog perhaps have turned unseasonably warm into nearly normal weather.

And irony of ironies, I just heard US Rep. John Boehner attacking Obama for not approving the whole XL Pipeline.  Boehner thinks it will lessen our dependence on "foreign" oil.  Canada better watch out.  Another Republican president may decide to attack Canada and make that oil non-foreign.   You can also check another post here with refers to the Bloomberg business news story indicating that the real purpose of the XL pipeline is to raise the price of midwest gasoline 10 to 20 cents a gallon since there is already "a glut of oil" in the midwest (defined there ast the area from Chicago to Denver and north apparently).

Check on how many gallons of gasoline and diesel fuel you burn in a year and add 20 cents a gallon.   That price increase for even only all South Dakotans will make the property tax likely to result from the construction of the XL Pipeline a pittance by comparision.

Just on the oil proposed to move through the XL pipeline, the extra profit would amount to 40 cents per gallon of crude oil on 42 gallons times 830,000 barrels of oil per day or about $11 or $12 million extra profit per day.  Did you really think that Boehner would actually support anything that reduced profits of big oil?

*** Stay tuned even if you could care less if coastal California and most of Florida end up under water--- Doug Wiken

 

 

*** We get letters....From Rep. Noem

Not that we are special or anything, but we got a letter from US Rep Noem.  Of course, I suspect practically everybody in SD gets these...at least anybody in that "Senior" category. This one asks, "1.Do you agree with the House plan to save Medicare that Rep. Noems supports?"

Noem is reassuring those of us old enough to qualify for Medicare, Medicade, and Social Security that the GOP has no intention of destroying these programs for those of us already in the programs, but, if you are younger, watch out.  The GOP plan is to convert these programs to private enterprise to provide "competition" to drive down costs.  These new systems are supposed to be "guaranteed".

Now, I do wonder how guaranteed anything that depends on free enterprise and insurance, bank, or brokerage outfits can possibly be.guaranteed.  Even though the Obama Administration has managed to get us out of much of the Bush broken bubble big hole, we should not forget that too soon.  Congress in its infinitely finite bought-and-paid-for attitude has failed to produce anything close to replacing the Glass-Steagall Act.  

GOP retrograde obstruction has actually prevented real reform or even regression back to a better form of regulation.   Do we want a guarantee from a private form of Medicare.  Do we want our government to guarantee some more "interesting" investment/insurance schemes?

So, perhaps to surprice nobody, I am suggesting that if you got one of these letters from Noem and it has a card you can use to reply to her question, checkl her "NO" option.  Give her a short comment to let her know you are not at all interested in giving your OK to another form of failed GOP mythology that fits with their obstructionist failed ideology and contempt for the same government that provides our congress critters with very cheap very good health insurance.

Start thinking seriously about sending Noem and fellow "trickle-down" Goppers back howling in the wilderness.....for the next 40 years.

They seem separated from reality by their own divide and conquer ideological, theocratic issues.  It is time Rep. Noem and fellows get a serious dose of serious reality.

*** Stay tuned, but take time to send Rep. Noem a message--- Doug Wiken

*** GOP Hypocrisy on Fuel price increases....another aspect or two

GOP presidential and congressional opposition and roadblocks to CAFE standards are also a factor in fuel prices. The GOP nonsense in the face of evidence and reality also made it easy for the US auto industry to get lackadaisical about safety and fuel economy. They are still playing catchup with the rest of the world automakers.

Hundreds and perhaps thousands of people have died needlessly in vehicles because of GOP opposition to even cheap safety design features. They are not only responsible for higher fuel prices, but the social costs of needless traffic fatalities and insurance costs.

Their current GOP hypocrisy, mythology, and denial of reality on these issues is (to use hyperbolic Santorum speak) enough to make a person want to vomit.

A note about this post: A friend reminded me of the GOP CAFE standards hypocrisy this morning.  I made the above comments relevant to that first at Mt. Blogmore.  And, if you want to read a good post by Kevin Woster at Mt. Blogmore that is also in a category of long-ever-do reality checks, take a look at:

Woster on Rush Limbaugh and his vituperative attack on a Female Congressional Witness

Truly, at "long last", I could not have written it better myself...well maybe, but little need to go over that again.

*** Stay tuned even if all I do is reference you to better ideas--- Doug Wiken