All during that health care debate, whenever things got impossible you could always say: “What I think they should do is pass the Wyden-Bennett Reform Plan,” and everybody would shut up and slink home to look it up on Google.

It’s a more elegant version of the Bipartisan Study Commission. Which, by the way, the Republicans recently filibustered.

Actually, I think we just need one simple change that will get us back to the good old days when Congress was capable of passing standard legislation and could occasionally summon the will to make large, imperfect fixes of urgent national problems.

Get rid of the Senate filibuster. It wouldn’t make things tidy. It wouldn’t be utopia. The Democrats will miss it next time they’re in the minority. But when people elected a government, it would get to govern again. And probably, it could keep the lights on.

Gail Collins, apparently summoning this material
from some long forgotten font of agreement between us.

Manna

Sweet, sweet research proves what I’ve been shouting about for a while now; this study took a look at what people react to (and email), essentially hoping to quantify why some articles go viral while others just sit there:

People preferred e-mailing articles with positive rather than negative themes, and they liked to send long articles on intellectually challenging topics.

Perhaps most of all, readers wanted to share articles that inspired awe, an emotion that the researchers investigated after noticing how many science articles made the list. In general, they found, 20 percent of articles that appeared on the Times home page made the list, but the rate rose to 30 percent for science articles, including ones with headlines like “The Promise and Power of RNA.” […]

“Science kept doing better than we expected,” […] “We anticipated that people would share articles with practical information about health or gadgets, and they did, but they also sent articles about paleontology and cosmology. You’d see articles shooting up the list that were about the optics of deer vision.”

Wait, wait, wait. I thought the answer to today’s problems in media were to shorten the article, dumb it down, and pack as much advertising (preferably blinking or animated) into the entirely theoretical “above the fold” space while also requiring innumerable “next page” clicks such that any still-sufficiently-interested reader would be so challenged to identify actual content that he or she would drop into a rage-seizure of some kind. Huh. Consider me gobsmacked. They continue:

To make sense of these trends in “virality,” the Penn researchers tracked more than 7,500 articles published from August 2008 to February 2009. They assessed each article’s popularity after controlling for factors like the time of day it was published online, the section in which it appeared and how much promotion it received on the Web home page.

A random sample of 3,000 of these articles was rated by independent readers for qualities like providing practical value or being surprising. The researchers also used computer algorithms to track the ratio of emotional words in an article and to assess the relative positivity or negativity.

[…]

More emotional stories were more likely to be e-mailed, the researchers found, and positive articles were shared more than negative ones. Longer articles generally did better than shorter articles, although Dr. Berger said that might just be because the longer articles were about more engaging topics. (The best way to test that, he said, would be for The Times to run shorter and longer versions of the same article that would be seen by different readers.)

Emphasis added by me to highlight the thing I want most: variably dimensioned articles. Got 15 seconds on the subway and just want the USAToday bullet? Here it is. Need an explainer that goes long on the various competing pieces of the legislation. Here it is. Want 10,000 words on the complete history of this movement in the United States. Here it is. Want a slideshow about the effects of doing/not doing this? Here it is. Want a video depicting those most affected? Here it is.

This sort of thing is not necessarily easy, and it’s certainly not free. But they’re doing a chunk of it already; they just don’t tie it together very well because they universally see themselves as, first and foremost, being in the dead-tree distribution business. The first newsroom with a national imprimatur that successfully enacts this can charge whatever they want. Eventually. The first hit is always, and must always be free. Wonder why the NYT paywall is going to work that way. Fascinating.

Why are you so popular?

Andrew Sullivan is worried about Sarah Palin, perhaps most especially because:

She can electrify a crowd. She has the kind of charisma that appeals to the sub-rational. and she has crafted a Peronist identity – utterly fraudulent, of course – that is political dynamite in a recession with populism roiling everyone and everything.

and yet the payload of that charismatically delivered speech:

was and is pure sophistry – a string of crowd-pleasing slogans with no content whatever, except for an endorsement of a global war on Islam, tax-cuts, populist attacks on Wall Street, a subtle but scary attempt to politicize the military as belonging to one party, cooptation of one religion in America, and, with the exception of nuclear power […] a desire for more carbon energy, not less (as long as it’s developed in the US).

Michael Wolff comes to a similar overall conclusion, but notes:

Now partly what this means is that all the things that make her so compelling are the things that will keep her marginal.

The problem with that is that she is not in any way marginal. The mainstream media reports on her comings and goings to a far greater degree than they do those of, say, Joe Biden or even their beloved St. John McCain. There were 200 credentialed media at this idiotic event, which boasted a total paid conference attendance of ~600. Does Obama pull 200 media credentials when he visits Elyria, OH or some other purely political stump?

And that gets us back to the key problem. The media will simply report her speech. It happened. Here’s what she said. Without context, it’s difficult for the low-information voter to grasp any useful information beyond “they’re reporting it, so they must think it’s important.” Likewise, when Palin appears on MSM shows, they refuse, categorically refuse to ask potentially illuminating questions. Witness this exchange:

WALLACE: Would you say that you’re more knowledgeable about domestic and foreign affairs now than you were two years ago?
PALIN: Well, I would hope so. Yes, I am.

which was followed by this incisive, hard-hitting prober:

WALLACE: I know that three years is an eternity in politics. But how hard do you think President Obama will be to defeat in 2012?

Keep in mind, Chris Wallace is FOXnews’ investigative arm. Howsabout asking what the Bush Doctrine is/was? Who were the primary “combatants” in the Cold War? Where is China located? Asking “are you improved at…” simply begs the follow-on of “then prove it.” But, of course, this never happens. She will never be stopped until it starts happening. And Chris Wallace, being home court as he is, would be precisely the person to do it. But he clearly doesn’t care to. And neither does anyone else. So much better to report whatever maunderings have turned up on Palin’s Facebook than to, you know, actually do some work and break what would be a cataclysmic, career-making story in the process. Dog-bites-man, to be sure, but Palin: as dangerously ignorant as ever would sell truckloads of paper.

Even more depressing, though, is Bob Somerby’s entirely accurate summation:

To defeat Palin and Palinism, we’ll actually have to do a hard thing: We’ll actually have to build and promote a winning progressive politics. […] In the place of developing actual politics, [Olberman and these other] well-trained ad salesmen invent inane claims—shriek, clatter, mislead and howl.

Yep.

I think, kind of tougher to, um, put our arms around, but allowing America’s spirit to rise again by not being afraid to kind of go back to some of our roots as a God fearing nation where we’re not afraid to say, especially in times of potential trouble in the future here, where we’re not afraid to say, you know, we don’t have all the answers as fallible men and women so it would be wise of us to start seeking some divine intervention again in this country, so that we can be safe and secure and prosperous again. To have people involved in government who aren’t afraid to go that route, not so afraid of the political correctness that you know – they have to be afraid of what the media said about them if they were to proclaim their alliance on our creator.

Sarah Palin
Judging by this quote she’ll be the next President of these United States.
And The Democrat will have put her there.

America Held Hostage: Day One

The Democrat, at least as currently constituted, simply does not understand what it takes to message. Every Democrat serving at every level should never even approach a microphone without uttering “America Held Hostage, Day X.” It’s as simple as that. Why is Senator Shelby holding America hostage over a couple of earmarks? Does he hate America?

Likewise: Up or down vote. Why won’t the GOP let the Senate vote on jobs creation? Why is the GOP against democracy? Just let the Senate vote; we will abide by the outcome. And etc…

That this is all so hard for them to understand is, perhaps, the single greatest argument in favor of their being dispatched from service come 2010. That they further don’t seem to understand that is, well, remarkable.

America Held Hostage: Day One

Imagine a chamber in which senators were elected by different income brackets – with two senators representing the poorest 2 percent of the electorate, two senators representing the richest 2 percent and so on.
Based on Census Bureau data, five senators would represent Americans earning between $100,000 and $1 million individually per year, with a single senator working on behalf of the millionaires (technically, it would be two-tenths of a senator). Eight senators would represent Americans with no income. Sixteen would represent Americans who make less than $10,000 a year, an amount well below the federal poverty line for families. The bulk of the senators would work on behalf of the middle class, with 34 representing Americans making $30,000 to $80,000 per year.

Annie Lowrey