Here’s how a definition gone wrong can lead to a debilitating public controversy. But hey, controversy drives traffic, so what the heck, right?
The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson
It’s been a long time, but the New York Times is back in the business of pumping up the traffic to its Website with news about itself.
Predictably, once again, it is doing the news organization’s reputation more harm than good in the long run. Will they ever learn from their own history? The documents are right there under their noses.
The problem is, it might cost them a massive amount of corporate advertising to tell the truth, and they would lose a few Republican readers in the process.
An explanation is in order. You came to the right place for this one.
President Obama and the First Lady Speak to Troops at Fort Bragg
by Glynn Wilson
Bush’s illegal and ill-fated war in Iraq is finally over. All of the U.S. troops are coming home after eight long years.
It was the longest war in American history, although the news media is not covering the war’s end as much as it did the “Shock and Awe” campaign that started it all on March 20, 2003.
President Barack Obama marked the occasion in a low-key, solemn fashion, by saluting the troops upon their return at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, but with “little fanfare,” according to the AP headline.
The wire service did report that Obama never tried to declare victory in this war, as Bush did with a “Mission Accomplished” banner aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003. Although it is doubtful that story made the front page of many newspapers or the top 10 minutes of many local news broadcasts in this country. It is a war we wish would just go away quietly, and for good reasons. It was started under faulty pretenses based on bad intelligence about a non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction program on the part of Saddam Hussein.
“It was a war that (Obama) opposed from the start, inherited as president and is now bringing to a close, leaving behind an Iraq still struggling,” the wire service reported.
A new Gallup poll has some heartening results for the Occupy Wall Street movement, in that more Americans approve than disapprove of the protests, although it shows that the lack of an effective communications strategy and coherent goals could jeopardize the movement’s effectiveness (see Further Analysis below).
Less than half of Americans express an opinion about the Occupy Wall Street movement’s goals or the way it has conducted its protests. Those with an opinion are more likely to approve than disapprove, however, according to the latest Gallup poll on the subject.
The Occupy Wall Street movement has attracted significant alternative and mainstream media attention for its nearly month-long protest of major U.S. financial institutions in New York, with similar demonstrations taking place in other cities across the country in recent weeks.
“But the American public does not seem to be very familiar with the movement or its goals,” according to Gallup’s analysis of public opinion.
Is Social Security a Ponzi scheme as Republican Presidential candidate Rick Perry claims? Noted author and former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich debunks that claim and five other lies the right-wing tells about taxes, government and the economy. Reich was speaking at the “Summit For A Fair Economy” in Minneapolis, Minnesota on September 10, 2011.
The lies Reich debunks:
1. Tax cuts to the rich and corporations trickle down to the rest of us.
Poor But Proud: Twenty Years Later
Auburn History Professor Wayne Flynt Answers the Central Political Question of Our Time
by Glynn Wilson
AUBURN, Ala. — In a state where intellectuals are generally scorned as “elitists” — or as former governor and presidential candidate George Wallace liked to call them for his own opportunistic political reasons, “pointy-headed liberals” — retired Auburn History professor Wayne Flynt is one expert who is widely known around Alabama. He is someone who people seem to listen to, at least those who pay attention.
Since moving back to my home state and city a few years ago after many years of chasing a journalism career and then an academic career elsewhere, and struggling to figure out what’s wrong with this place, a key question comes up over and over again in conversation. No one seem to have a simple, satisfying answer.
Why do working class people in the South so frequently vote against their own economic self-interest?
As a historian and author, Dr. Flynt tackled this question in great detail a little more than 20 years ago in a book called Poor But Proud: Alabama’s Poor Whites.
The birds are singing. The bees are buzzing, and the dogwood blooms are popping out here on the official first day of spring, known in science as the vernal equinox, the day each year when the day and night are almost exactly 12 hours long as the Sun crosses the celestial equator going northward, rising exactly due east and setting directly in the west.
Sitting here contemplating the surroundings in this little human-engineered slice of suburban heaven, if one can call it that, it is temping to sip the good coffee and imagine that all is right with the world, as the saying goes.
But of course, as much as we would like to put the problems of the world out of our minds and escape, we know all is not right with the world, our country or our state.
If it wasn’t already obvious, it is now as clear as a crystal ball that no matter how sophisticated humans become at engineering electrical power systems, they are all bound to fail at some point, to kill a bunch of people — and cost way more than the economists can ever predict. That goes for coal as well as oil and nuclear power. It’s just that we haven’t suffered from a major coal mine collapse — this week.
Hint: The Conservative South is Less Happy Than the Rest of the Country
The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson
Only in America, a country founded on the ideals of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” is there a statistical measure of “well-being” where highly paid social scientists spend a lot of time and money trying to figure out just how happy we are as a people.
Unfortunately, we don’t have data from July 4, 1776 to gauge how we compare with our ancestors on that score. There were no pollsters in those days, and only a few newspapers and a primitive voting system to gauge public opinion.
There are some important lessons to be drawn from such measures of public opinion, however, if you look deeper than the basic numbers.
It should come as no real shock that the happiest people in the happiest state in the country live in Hawaii, a dreamy set of tropical islands where the climate is wonderful all year around, the unemployment rate is only 6.3 percent (compared to 8.9 percent nationally) and only 8 percent of the population is uninsured (compared to 17 percent nationally).
According to the latest Gallup well being scores, the people of Hawaii expressed the highest wellbeing among states with a score of 71 out of 100.
It is sort of sad, when you think about it, that even in the happiest state of them all, the score is only a C on any standard academic report card. The country as a whole only averages a D score of 66 percent on Gallup’s well-being index.
Was there ever a time when the country was closer to being 100 percent happy? Maybe in the 1960s or the 1990s, times when the economy was booming and the future looked bright? Unfortunately, Gallup was not conducting these polls then, so we will never know.
As I sit here sipping my coffee and pouring over the data this Sunday morning, I’m wondering what it would take to improve these scores? There are some clues in the numbers. More on that in the end.
“The sedge is wither’d from the lake, and no birds sing.”
- John Keats, “La Belle Dame sans Merci”
The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson
When natural history writer Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962, she was violently assailed by threats of lawsuits and derision, including suggestions that this meticulous scientist was a “hysterical woman,” unqualified to write such a book, according to Wikipedia and many other sources from the time. A huge counterattack was organized and led by the Monsanto corporation, Velsicol, American Cyanamid — indeed, the entire chemical industry — duly supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, as well as the more cautious and conservative in the American news media.
Today, as the birds are dying en mass all over the Southeastern United States in a winter that could lead to another very real Silent Spring, any suggestion that the deaths might have something to do with the largest and worst environmental disaster in this nation’s history, the so-called BP oil spill, is met with derision and cat calls of a “conspiracy theory.”
On the other side, many caught up in the full throes of the economic, environmental and health crisis from the BP, Transocean, Halliburton caused disaster along the Gulf of Mexico coast also see a conspiracy and cover up at work, all the way up to and including the White House.
After several days of attempting to research this story as an experienced science writer, it is now obvious to me that we may never get to the bottom of the riddle of the Great Blackbird Die-Off of 2011. Not because of any conspiracy theory on either side, mind you. But because the way modern science works at government agencies is simply not organized or equipped to deal with such a new and massive threat.
If you have been keeping up with the news, you will recall that the first hint of something going horribly wrong came on New Year’s Eve, when revelers in a small Arkansas town were enjoying midnight fireworks and then noticed something other than sparks falling from the sky: thousands of dead blackbirds. The red-winged blackbirds rained out of the darkness onto rooftops and sidewalks and into fields, according to local newspapers, television news broadcasts and the Associated Press.
During the Bush years, we specialized in covering the politicization of the U.S. justice system as much as any news organization. Our archives are about the most comprehensive for anyone researching the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, and the original case against Richard Scrushy, which Glynn Wilson covered for The New York Times.
