Fact Checkers Find Dirty Harry Off Target
"Eastwood mistakenly said that 23 million Americans are “unemployed.” Actually, the figure is a little more than half that — 12.8 million in July, according to the most recent figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

"Eastwood didn’t phrase things as artfully as most other convention speakers. The often-used 23 million figure also includes 8.2 million who are employed in part-time jobs but say they are seeking full-time work, the so-called “under-employed.” And it also includes another 2.5 million who say they would like a job and would take one, but haven’t looked for one in the last four weeks."

What really caught my eye about this, other than the Clint Eastwood part, was the passing reference in the next paragraph to the ways politicians usually speak to us.

"We hate to nit-pick one of our favorite actor/directors, who is not all that used to the ways politicians inflate numbers without actually saying something false. (He could have said 23 million who “need work” or “are suffering from lack of jobs” and not been technically wrong.)

"But then, Eastwood was mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea, Calif., and so he knows something of politics. And other film stars have gone on to run for even higher office. To which we say: Go ahead, make our day." 

For the full report on last night at the convention see Facecheck.

Richard Rohr and Conflict Management
Richard Rohr Today: If God is “crucified flesh” for Paul, and that is what he has fallen in love with, then everything is a disguise: weakness is really strength, wisdom is really foolishness, death is really life, matter is really spirit, religion is often slavery, and sin itself is actually the trap door into salvation. People must recognize what a revolutionary thinker Paul was with such teachings as these; and we made him into a mere moralistic churchman.

So the truth lies neither in the total affirmation nor in the total denial of either side of things, but precisely in the tug of war between the two. Hold on to that, and you will become wise and even holy. But be prepared to displease those on either entrenched side.

"The truth lies in the tug of war."  Hold on to the tug of war.  "But be prepared to displease those on either entrenched side."  This sounds like a more productive way to live and approach the conflicts and challenges in our lives.  It feels like a spiritual way to describe the attitude we need to bring to democratic deliberation:  engage with love, always be prepared to struggle with paradox because the usual either/or thinking is a simplistic sounding trap that is more familiar than productive, more about avoiding questions than seriously addressing them. 

My struggle is to do this—hold on to the tug of war—without letting anger, impatience, isolation or self-righteousness cloud my judgment and spoil my relationships.  Holding onto the tug of war is not, itself, wisdom.  It is a path, an approach, an attitude, a habit of the heart.  And when we succeed at doing this we can feel isolated, because almost by definition we do not fit in (on either side anyway).  We do not fit into the usual categories that most people use to label folks.  We cannot rely on the arsenal of sound-bites on either side, because these are (designed to be) traps. 

Sound-bites are quick and easy; without them it takes longer and requires more thinking and listening and engagement.  It takes longer, just as Billie Holiday noted that 'the difficulty I can do right now, the impossible will take a little while.'  But feeling isolated, and without words, because we are holding on to the tug of war, also feels frustrating and can easily lead to impatient self-righteousness.  However, while that can feel like part of holding onto the tug of war, it is really casting the tug of war aside and screaming 'listen to me and come to my side.'  This is another reason to keep in mind that 'every conversation is sacred,’ because that attitude is a tributary back to the central path of holding onto the tug of war, which is propelled by routinely engaging with love, as a habit of the heart.

President's Live Reddit Interview
David Graham, associate editor of The Atlantic (and Akronite), summarized the president's responses to questions in a recent live reddit interview.  18 tax cuts for small businesses in his first term...I did not know that.

And this cartoon captures for me why the Todd Akin story became (and still is) a story.  Politics is so incredibly scripted these days that the rare glimpse into what our public officials are actually thinking stands out and provides some clarity.

For Both Conventions...Fact Checking After Each Evening Should be Job 1
Politifact evaluates a long list of claims made at the convention last night.

Obama Supports Clinton Welfare-to-Work Law

Candidate Romney’s ad claiming the president weakened welfare-to-work requirements has been evaluated by various respected fact checkers and called

·         Wildly misleading

·         Hypocritical

·         False

·         Shameless deception

·         Blatantly false

·         Pants on fire false

·         Mind-boggling

Yet he continues to run the ad and repeat this demonstrably false claim in speeches.  The above terms do not indicate a ‘gray area’ or a point on which reasonable minds might disagree.  Those terms describe an intentional, ongoing, and well-financed effort to mislead.  Get the facts.

Reject Intentionally Misleading Messages Saturating Communication Channels
Not just a random error or exaggeration.  By design.  Thomas Edsall points out that the two central themes that the Romney ads are pounding away at, using their enormous financial advantage, have BOTH been evaluated by the three top fact-check organizations as fabrications.  And seen together,

“Sharp criticism has done nothing to hold back the Romney campaign from continuing its offensive — in speeches and on the air — because the accuracy of the ads is irrelevant as far as the Republican presidential ticket is concerned. The goal is not to make a legitimate critique, but to portray Obama as willing to give the “undeserving” poor government handouts at the expense of hardworking taxpayers.”

The goal is not to inform or lead or even criticize, but to mislead and divide…and combine this with Romney himself repeatedly accusing the President of running a divisive campaign.  So many layers of cowardice; so bad for America.

A third, equally misleading—and intentionally so—message has been Paul Ryan repeating that the President inherited a tough situation and made it worse.  Professor Robert McElvaine, points out that the first part of this claim is a ‘gross understatement,’ and the second part is a ‘gross misstatement.’

“The bottom line is that over the 64 years leading up to the inauguration of President Obama, jobs were created more than twice as fast under Democrats as they were under Republicans.

Even a glance at the graph shows that Barack Obama and his policies did not make the “difficult” — disastrous would be a more accurate term — situation he inherited worse.”

We can see the job creation situation pretty clearly in the following graph:

 

In the wake of Citizens United, we should not underestimate the power of the professionally packaged efforts to distract and mislead us.  Every citizen should bookmark www.factcheck.com and check it regularly, along with Politifact and The Washington Post’s fact checker, Glenn Kessler.  Because the data simply does not support the claims being made....

Do not let the handful of extremely un-American billionaires bankrolling these ads get away with re-writing our recent history.  Do not let them set up house in your head and distort your thinking.  Whether to favor the vision for America offered by the incumbent or the challenger…in this election, more than any other in my lifetime, it is absolutely essential that we all put in the work to get the facts so we can trust our own judgment…

· Annenburg Public Policy Center Factcheck

· Tampa Bay Times Politifact

· Washington Post Fact Checker

Bookmark these sites and check them every day…see this as your patriotic duty, because it is up to regular Americans to stand up and do the right thing…if these factcheck sites are among our daily sources of news we might be strong enough to take on the advertising juggernaut let loose on Average Americans by Citizens United.

Remember
Small minded leaders, who are banking on the fact that many of us will forget that they told us their strategy was to block any action by this president, now want to blame the president because not enough was done to stimulate the economy.

Trolling
What do you know about the phenomena known as internet trolling?  Most define it as “someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary intent of provoking readers into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.” or so Wikipedia tells me.

Others see trolling as even more nasty
Trolls are "mean, nasty individuals who use online anonymity to be cruel, spread their own brand of hate, destroy reputations and products, and generally try to upset and crush as many people and companies as they possibly can.  [They] agitate to start fights between friends or strangers; They disrupt forums with off-topic comments, brag nonstop about themselves, ridicule the thoughts of others or insert controversial comments to disrupt conversations. [Some] spread lies, deceive and cause damage , and they enjoy every minute they can make someone else miserable."

And Yet, Consider This...
While I am no expert on internet trolling and do not disagree with the above, yet I would add that there seems like there is an even more insidious form of trolling to pay attention to...

A troll's objective is to disrupt the conversation and this does not require nasty language.  In fact, it might be more effective to do so politely, to politely repeat claims that have been thoroughly discredited, for instance, like the president is an alien, Muslim, socialist.

This is one way to disrupt a conversation, to troll, and it is particularly effective when the conversation is already very complex and emotionally charged...like electoral deliberations.

Is our best response to challenge a troll's motive: to expose them as simply seeking to make conversation more difficult through pointless, but polite, distraction?

One fairly thoughtful blog noted the following in bold, and this seems to highlight the more sophisticated (and more common place) type of trolling I am concerned about here.

"A troll is not angry or otherwise emotional about the topic.... They will say whatever gets the biggest reaction."

The blog sees this sophisticated troll as 'without a horse in the race,' and that would be one type, but it is certainly possible to imagine a high paid troll of this type seeing an advantage to her or his candidate or party in a more disrupted conversation about this or that topic.

This is why I think we should learn to powerfully but with civility challenge the motives of these types of trolls. We are, of course, interested in the random individual who goes off and is uncivil, as in the wikipedia internet troll. But ought we not be more concerned about the forms of incivility mobilized by the most powerful, trolling our communication channels with resources beyond our imagination?

Globalized Golden Rule
With a small amount of research, or some honest soul searching, we can discover that others whom we often demonize are an awful lot like us.  Check out this short list of the major world religions and you will see that the Muslim and Christian, Hindu and Jew, all share the same core belief in the Golden Rule.

Before you escape back to more familiar ground with ‘but we live it and they don’t’ just think for a moment.  It is more likely the case that we all struggle to engage with love, with varying degrees of success in each of us, in communities where some are loving our neighbors and others are not, but we are all in communities that identify the Golden Rule as the core aspiration of a well-lived life.

Shouldn’t Starting with the Best Available Data Be Non-Partisan and Patriotic?
There are over a thousand right-wing hate groups in the US. Nearly all are white male Christian groups and they are the source of most domestic terrorism. Yet, our conversation about domestic terrorism—including how law enforcement agencies profile in airports—focuses on Muslims.

“If the news media and political leaders were told there were a thousand violence-prone Muslim groups operating in the United States, can you imagine the reaction? Yet, apart from the glancing attention given incidents like the Sikh temple massacre, the national discourse about terrorism focuses almost exclusively on Muslims.”

Racial profiling? Yes. But it is not only discriminatory; it is targeting our resources in a direction not likely to make us safer.

It is racist and it is stupid. It is also one illustration of intentionallymisleading news stories distracting us from addressing real threats to advance the interests of a narrow segment of American elites who want us to focus our anger and frustration on Muslims or other less powerful groups...rather than on leadership failure.

It is racist, stupid, and it confuses and distracts us from the conversations we should be having about how to keep our children safe.

Understanding How Science Works
Here is a great, and very brief, description of Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which is without a doubt one of the most influential books written in the past 50 years.

Interested in Understanding Spin?
Check out this Youtube interview of philosopher Harry Frankfurt, or listen to the author read the essay, or read the text the old fashioned way.  His essay, which is the best analysis of spin I have have ever read and really helps us better understand politics, is titled On Bullshit.

Consider this...
The Paul Ryan selection makes the most sense as strategy.  Will the Romney-Ryan campaign operate as two campaigns, both speaking with the expected platitudes to two different audiences?  Will Ryan charge up the base with Tea Party rhetoric while Romney stands above the fray to reach out to moderates and independents?  How much of a gap between their two messages will the press (and the democrats) allow them to get away with?

The Incivility We See May Be Our Own
Civility in America 2012 recently released their new poll results, finding that Americans think incivility in politics is harmful to the country and that our perceptions of civility are related to our own biases.  They found the following: 

·         68% of Democrats see Republicans as uncivil, but only 31% see their side as uncivil

·         68% of Republicans see Democrats as uncivil, but only 38% see their side as uncivil

The next time we think we see 'obvious' bias and incivility...rethink

Evaluating Paul Ryan

David Stockman, Ronald Reagan’s budget director, concluded the following in his analysis of the Paul Ryan budget proposal.

“In short, Mr. Ryan’s plan is devoid of credible math or hard policy choices. And it couldn’t pass even if Republicans were to take the presidency and both houses of Congress. Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan have no plan to take on Wall Street, the Fed, the military-industrial complex, social insurance or the nation’s fiscal calamity and no plan to revive capitalist prosperity — just empty sermons.”

This assessment from the right is worth reading.  From the left there is a growing concern about Paul Ryan’s close relationship with the extreme-right billionaire Koch Brothers who have committed to spending $200 billion dollars on this campaign.  And there appears to be concern among Christians about the fact that Ryan lists atheist Ayn Rand as one of his intellectual mentors.

Just spent a couple of weeks with my family in RI and the universe feels more aligned.  Thanks Mom and Dad for continuing to show us how to live and laugh with love. 

Guns and the Colorado Shooting
A very short and extremely thoughtful piece in the Atlantic unpacks some useful data on this question.  Well worth a read. 

While I see great value in the 2nd Amendment, I wonder about the claim that wider citizen gun ownership would have stopped that Colorado shooter.  First, gun ownership is already widespread.  Second, the claim can only mean two things...and neither meaning seems to hold water upon closer examination.

Either the shooter would have been stopped if most or all of the theater goers were armed...but this could only be a recipe for a more chaotic scene with many more deaths.  Or the shooter would have been stopped if one or two of the theater goers were armed and stood up for the rest of us...but isn't that what we call a police force?