Cory is encouraging IEEE members to urge that organization to fly right in its recommendations on electronic voting machines. The EFF is pushing the issue. (You are a member, aren’t you?) Cory writes:

The people who are writing the IEEE standard for voting
machines have been doing their best to rig their deliberative process
ot exclude input from non-vendors who want the standard to include
performance metrics that will guard against electoral malfeasance. This
is heavy stuff: the standard this committee produces will likely form
the basis of the US goverment’s voting-machine purchases (as well as
those of governments abroad), and if there are holes in the standard
today, they will be biting our democracies on the ass for decades.
There’s never been a clearer demonstration that “architecture is
politics.”

We have to get this right. It cuts to our faith in the legitimacy of elections. Lose that and you lose democracy.

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According to an article by Anne Geske in the Utne Reader (Sept-Oct):

A map showing percentages of adult movies in the home-video market by state ‘bore an eerie resemblance’ to the 2000 election, remarked Pete du Pont in a recent Wall Street Journal Web site column. A survey conducted by the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States also found that the vast majority of states that voted for George W. Bush are states that are less responsive to issues of sexual rights and sexual health. Criteria used in this survey included the right to engage in sexual behavior in private, the right to express one’s sexual orientation, and the right to sexual information and health services.

Bogus Contest: Let’s come up with new slogans for the Democratic Party. For example:

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ClassyDee takes me to task for recommending a “slick Flash” that presents facts about one aspect of how the Florida election was stolen. He writes, in part:

The data in the report may be accurate but the piece is still just propaganda and that is bad news. While a robust fight against the end of democracy is required it shouldn’t be carried using the weapons of totalitarianism… clearly the messages just blur together into a large blitz of value based attack ads, and nobody is the winner after such a thorough destruction of reason and sanity.

No one wants political discourse to consist of nothing but slick Flashes, but that it’s slick doesn’t mean it’s propaganda. Rhetoric matters. Rhetoric is legitimate. Rhetoric is unavoidable. Candidates should do more than issue position statements. Political conversations are not merely rational debates. They can’t be because no debates are merely rational unless — impossibly — the sides don’t care about their points of view. Politics requires that sometimes we be out to convince others, and not every effort to convince can be counted as propaganda if the term’s going to mean more than “What humans say.”

Some of the earmarks of actual propaganda: It makes no reference to any facts. It lies. It does nothing but associate emotive images. It’s got the word “Fox” displayed in the lower right.

Glorious footage of W pretending he landed a jet on an aircraft carrier is propaganda. Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech is not.

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From Jay Rosen‘s terrific journalism blog:

First in Philadelphia, then again in Buffalo, Federal agents were ordered to block “print” reporters from questioning Attorney General John Ashcroft during events where he defended the Patriot Act and talked about the urgency of renewing it.

Note: The man using federal agents to prevent the print media from talking with him is the Attorney General of the US.

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From North of the Border, Michael O’Conner Clarke writes:

India’s Business Standard newspaper is reporting on the RNC’s ‘smart’ use of campaign funds – using low-paid sweatshop call centre workers in Noida, India to call up Americans and pump them for campaign funds to support the Bush re-election campaign.

The Republicans deny it.

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Project Censored has released its list of the 25 top under-reported media stories of 2002-2003. (Thanks to slashdot for the link.)

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According to a column by Scot Lehigh in the Boston Globe:

Phasing out the estate tax alone, for example, will cost the treasury $138 billion over 10 years, notes Robert McIntyre, director of Citizens for Tax Justice. Rate reductions for families earning more than $225,000 will equal $81 billion over three years, adds McIntyre, while the new break for dividend income will reduce the federal coffers by $70 billion over the same period.

Those are some big numbers.

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Gary Unblinking Stock points to an article in the Madison Capital Times:

When Sally Baron’s family wrote her obituary, they described a northern Wisconsin woman who raised six children and took care of her husband after he was crushed in a mining accident. …

…Almost in unison, what her children decided to include in the obituary was this: “Memorials in her honor can be made to any organization working for the removal of President Bush.”

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An article in “Washington Monthly” by Joshua Micah Mitchell suggests the irony that neoconservatives are Post-Modern in their willingness to choose the truths that suit them. He writes:

In that simple, totalizing assumption [that experts can be ignored even if they are right in the particulars] we find the kernel of almost every problem the administration has faced over recent months — and a foretaste of the troubles the nation may confront in coming years. By disregarding the advice of experts, by shunting aside the cadres of career professionals with on-the-ground experience in these various countries, the administration’s hawks cut themselves off from the practical know-how which would have given them some chance of implementing their plans successfully. In a real sense, they cut themselves off from reality.

The article does a good job cataloging the administration’s lies and mistakes. I just don’t see what it has to do with Post-Modernism. Here’s what Marshall thinks it has to do with PoMo-ism:

For an administration that has been awfully hard on the French, that mindset is…well, rather French. They are like deconstructionists and post-modernists who say that everything is political or that everything is ideology. That mindset makes it easy to ignore the facts or brush them aside because “the facts” aren’t really facts, at least not as most of us understand them.

This is just so wrong under a thin veneer of being right. Pomo doesn’t say there is no truth so you can say and believe whatever you. It is worrying at something much harder: truth isn’t a direct relation between self and world. It is mediated by language and history. That raises issues about the nature of truth … issues confirmed by even the most casual acquaintance with the world’s diversity.

So, no, the Bush administration isn’t PostModern. Any administration that says the world is divided into good people and evil-doers is way out of the PoMo parade. IMO, the Bush administration’s policies are a instead based on a bracing mix of self-assertion, self-delusion, willful ignorance and lies.

Of course, I could be wrong.

(Thanks to John Erickson for the link.)

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