What keeps the major networks the major networks?

According to this author from Business Insider, its the major advertisers and a process in place that gives them a special role in how ad dollars are spent:

Right now, ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, and some of the major cable channels, are holding their "upfront" buying events in Midtown New York. They do this every year: The networks put on crazy shows, featuring their big stars, trying to build as much buzz as possible.

The shows are for ad-buyers, not the public. Last year, Jimmy Kimmel did a set for ABC in which he mocked the NBC show "Animal Practice," which featured a monkey. "This is the first time that NBC has had a star that throws its own feces since Gary Busey on 'Celebrity Apprentice,'" he said. Then he added, "We know that you have 9 billion to spend this week, so don't get all cheap-o, Secret Service on us" (a reference to the scandal in which a presidential security officer short-changed a prostitute).

Once the shows are over, the buyers and the networks literally enter a secret room, or at least a room that no one else is allowed into, and do their deals. About $10 billion will get spent this month. Ad Age describes it this way:

This is the time of year when the most powerful ad execs in the nation stand in line — line! — to get into Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center to hear the pitch, see the clips and laugh along with the stars.

… after these big parties are over, possibly as few as 40 people from the networks, agencies and brands will go into backrooms and decide how $9 billion of the $62 billion U.S. TV ad market will be spent next year.

This is madness. No other billion-dollar commodity exchanges hands with this lack of transparency.

From The Dish: Democracy’s Discontents

Andrew Sullivan flags a report that says we've always complained about the quality of our government and have worried that things are falling apart.

Maybe that's to be expected in a democracy.

Here's the main article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Note that one of the causes is free speech - we are free to criticize, even if that criticism is unwarranted. Sounds like ground Madison covered in Fed #10. This might cause us to modify our opinions about whether government and/or is in fact "broken."

. . . Lamenting the failings of democracy is a permanent feature of democratic life, one that persists through governmental crises and successes alike.

There is no decade from the past century when it is not possible to find an extended debate among commentators and intellectuals in the democratic West about the inadequacies of democratic politics. This is not true of only those decades when Western democracy was clearly on the ropes, like the 1930s, when it was menaced by fascism, or the 1970s, when it was threatened by inflation and oil shock. It's also true of the prosperous and relatively stable decades as well. In the 1920s, Walter Lippmann led the charge, arguing that democratic publics were far too ill-informed and inattentive to manage their own affairs. In the 1950s, academics worried about the banality and exhaustion of democratic life. Daniel Bell took a positive stance with his claims about the end of ideology, but for the most part democracy was treated as a cumbersome, careless system of government, in permanent danger of being outwitted by the Soviets.

Even the 1980s, which we now look back on as a time of emergent democratic triumphalism, were dominated by prophecies of doom. Consider the two best-selling academic books from the end of that decade. One, Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind(1987), argued that the endemic triviality of mass democracy would destroy the minds of the young, leaving them unable to distinguish good from bad. (Bloom blamed, among other people, Mick Jagger.) The second, Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1988), foretold American decline as the demands of sustaining a global empire would overwhelm the capacity of the American people to put up with them.

The history of modern democracy is a tale of steady success accompanied by the constant drumbeat of anticipated failure. The intellectual commentator who first spotted this distinctive feature of democratic life (and who did most to explain it) was Alexis de Tocque­ville. When he traveled to America, in 1831, Tocqueville was immediately struck by the frenetic and mindless quality of democratic politics. Citizens were always complaining, and their politicians were endlessly throwing mud at one another. The grumbling discontent was frequently interrupted by bursts of outright panic as resentments spilled over.

Yet Tocqueville noticed something else about American democracy: that underneath the chaotic surface, it was quite stable. Citizens' discontent coincided with an underlying faith that democratic politics would see them right in the end.

A political system like this creates plenty of space for writers and intellectuals to tut-tut and throw up their hands in horror. Why? First, and most obviously, democratic politics entails free speech, which must include the freedom to say that democracy doesn't work. Second, democracy is, as Tocqueville put it, an "untimely" form of government. Its strengths are revealed only in the long run, once its restless energy produces the adaptability that allows it to correct its own mistakes. At any given moment, democracy tends to look a mess: shallow, petty, and vituperative. Democracies are bad at rising to the occasion. What they are good at is chopping and changing course so that no occasion is too much for them. Finally, rationalist modern intellectuals are inherently suspicious of blind political faith. It is unnerving to encounter a political system that works only because ordinary people believe that it works. Ordinary citizens get frustrated with the workings of democracy but rarely, if ever, give up on it. The people who tend to lose faith are intellectuals who can't reconcile themselves to the mismatch between the glorious promise of democratic life and its grubby reality.

From the Atlantic: Now Abolish the Filibuster for Legislation, Too

People don't seem all that upset at the demise of the filibuster.

This guys wants to see it to further and have it repealed fro legislation also:

Much of the commentary on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid rolling back the filibuster for most presidential appointees has been celebratory, even euphoric. It certainly was a step toward restoring some semblance of "majority rule" to our creaking 200-year-old republic. But commentators seem to forget that the filibuster has been used to sandbag important legislation as well, not just presidential appointments. And that's arguably where the most damage has been done. All sorts of good legislation, supported by a majority of the nation, also enjoyed majority support in the Senate, but Reid was not able to muster 60 out of 100 votes and break GOP-led filibusters.

Recent Senate filibusters of important progressive-leaning legislation include:
Firearm background checks: After the horror of Sandy Hook and other massacres, 54 senators supported legislation in April 2013 to institute background checks aimed at stopping would-be buyers who are ineligible to own guns. Polls showed that 90 percent of Americans supported the measure. Yet the bill died because its advocates could not round up the 60 votes needed to avoid a filibuster. President Obama called it a "shameful day for Washington," but it was really a pretty typical day in this era.

Cap-and-trade: One of the top items on Obama's agenda after taking office in 2009 was to implement a cap-and-trade law to cut carbon emissions. In June 2009, the Democrat-controlled House passed a bill, but it stalled in the Senate after failing to garner enough votes to overcome a Republican-led filibuster. In July 2010, Democrats finally abandoned hope of passing legislation in the upper chamber. "In order to pass comprehensive legislation, you have to have 60 votes. To get 60 votes, you've got to have Republicans. As of today, we don't have one Republican," said then-Senator John Kerry.

American Jobs Act: A GOP-led filibuster killed this jobs-and-stimulus bill in October 2011. Fifty-one senators voted in favor of a procedural motion to begin debate on the bill—short of the required 60 votes. The bill was a mix of tax cuts and new spending aimed at spurring job creation. It included $270 billion in payroll-tax cuts and other tax relief, along with $175 billion in new spending on roads, school repairs, and other infrastructure projects, as well as an extension of unemployment benefits and aid to local governments to prevent impending teacher and police layoffs. A majority of senators representing far more than a majority of the American people supported the bill.

Paycheck Fairness Act: The Senate Republican minority blocked passage of the Paycheck Fairness Act in June 2012, with "only" 52 senators voting for the bill and 47 against. The act aimed to decrease the pay gap between women and men by increasing protections for women filing gender-discrimination lawsuits, creating a federal-grant program to improve women's salary-negotiating skills, and rewarding employers who have fair pay practices, among other steps.

Sequestration: In February 2013, a Democratic compromise budget plan would have replaced the sequester with a combination of spending cuts and new revenue from closed tax loopholes. It had Senate majority support but it was shot down by Senate Republicans, with 51 senators voting for and 49 against.

Affordable Care Act: In March 2010, Democrats had to deploy the budget maneuver called “reconciliation” to cut off a Republican filibuster of Obama’s signature healthcare legislation. Though the bill was passed, filibusters, as well as threats of filibusters and other parliamentary tricks, constricted lawmakers' flexibility and contributed to the byzantine final law—which in turn helped to create today's implementation mess.

In each of these cases, Democrats tried and failed to find 60 votes, but there are plenty of other cases where they didn't even try. The way the filibuster works today is that even the threat can stop legislation in its tracks. Because the process takes Senate floor time, the Democratic majority has in recent years preferred to avoid drawn-out confrontations by essentially giving in to threats and moving on to other business. Small wonder that the Senate—and by extension the entire government—has become so paralyzed.

Restless America

Click here for a nice interactive graphic showing which states people are moving from and to.

Here's the full static picture, and commentary.



Note that while it is true that half a million people mover to Texas in 2012 - 400,000 left.

GOVT 2305 and 2306 Review, Part Two

If you have nothing better to do right now, review the respective constitutions - whichever is relevant for you class.

I can promise you a good handful of questions about them.

See if you can commit to memory the subject of each article. What are they each about?

Breaking News from the Washington Post: Supreme Court will take up new health law dispute

It has accepted a challenge to the inclusion of contraception coverage in insurance plans based on religious objections.

The Supreme Court has agreed to referee another dispute over President Barack Obama’s health care law, whether businesses can use religious objections to escape a requirement to cover birth control for employees.

The justices said Tuesday they will take up an issue that has divided the lower courts in the face of roughly 40 lawsuits from for-profit companies asking to be spared from having to cover some or all forms of contraception.
The court will consider two cases. One involves Hobby Lobby Inc., an Oklahoma City-based arts and crafts chain with 13,000 full-time employees. Hobby Lobby won in the lower courts.

The other case is an appeal from Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp., a Pennsylvania company that employs 950 people in making wood cabinets. Lower courts rejected the company’s claims.

Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Though I pose as an expert in class, I'm really not - but it seems to me the court is going to hear the case because of the split rulings by the lower courts.

From Scotusblog:

Taking on a new constitutional dispute over the Affordable Care Act, the Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed to hear challenges to the requirement that employers must provide health insurance for their workers that includes birth control and related medical services.  The Court said it would decide constitutional issues, as well as claims under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

The Court granted review of a government case (Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, 13-354) and a private business case (Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp. v. Sebelius, 13-356).   Taking the Conestoga plea brought before the Court the claim that both religious owners of a business and the business itself have religious freedom rights.  The Hobby Lobby case was keyed to rights under RFRA.

Here's a link to the Wikipedia page on RFRA. In 2305 we discussed this law in the section on religious liberty. It was passed after the court ruled against the peyote using members of an Oregon tribe who were fired from the drug rehab jobs.

The court has ruled on issues related to RFRA previously:

It was held unconstitutional as applied to the states in the City of Boerne v. Flores decision in 1997, which ruled that the RFRA is not a proper exercise of Congress's enforcement power. But it continues to be applied to the federal government, for instance in Gonzales v. O Centro Espirita Beneficente Uniao do Vegetal, because Congress has broad authority to carve out exemptions from federal laws and regulations that it itself has authorized.

The Kennedy Assassination and the Rise of Television

One of the points made last week when the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination was observed was that the event marked the rise of television as a major source of information for the public, and a unique one at that.

One of the items we are looking at this week in 2305 is the media, and I like discussing the impact of technology on how the media impacts the world of government and politics.

Here's one commentator's take, he notes that most people above the age of 4 or 5 remembers where they were that day:

Each of them, I can assure you, remembers precisely what they were doing 50 years ago, and I can further assure you that a common denominator of their day was that television set.

Remember that in 1963, television was still a relatively young medium — just about 13 years old, not counting the late 40s, when schedules and networks were still in an embryonic state. TV was still a novelty, color TV an exotic luxury — true color along with shows in color would not arrive until the middle of the decade.

People watched everything on their sets in shades of gray — that was the reality of TV, as presented day after day . . . And then, this incredible moment in Dallas, in black and white, but as real, as solid, as the hand you hold in front of your face . . .

TV news by '63 was no longer subsidiary to radio — that transition had happened, at least resoundingly, by '59-60, with coverage of the political conventions — but its role remained amorphous — a young industry in search of a mission. I lay some of this out in a story in today's paper, but it can't begin to capture the role television news suddenly stumbled upon that day — partly because television itself was surprised .

I spoke with Roger Mudd the other day — Roger, then a young CBS News correspondent in Washington — who remembers coming home later that night."My wife was at home watching television and she was crying and our 5 year old son Daniel came into the room where she was and saw his mother crying, so he turned the television off. So here's this young fellow, 5 years old, not knowing why his mother was crying but all he knew was that the television was to blame."

That linkage — of grief, loss, horror, mourning, catharsis and all in real-time, and all on TV — wasn't merely novel but revolutionary. Suddenly TV was no longer a "utility" — a toaster with pictures — but an elemental part of our emotional life: Our most secret hopes and fears and desires, all bound up with the hopes and desires and fears of 200 million other people.

Some Texas Republicans are turning Democrat

Only a couple have been featured, and nothing prominent, so no way to know if this turns into a trend, but as the Republican Party in the state becomes more conservative, moderate Republicans might shift parties.

Here are the two:

- Republican turned Democrat runs for Cornyn’s Senate seat
- Texas Judge Switches to Democratic Party: "The Republican Party Left Me" 

Both say the party became too conservative for them. Perhaps they were also driven from the party by conservatives who thing they are RINOs - Republicans in Name Only. Maybe they are opportunists who think the tide might be shifting in favor of Democrats in the state and want to get in early.

Who knows, but its a trend worth following.

The Texas Republican Party benefited when the national Democratic Party became too liberal for moderates in the Texas Democratic Party. Politics is like a pendulum so there's little reason to believe that the pendulum can swing back. No telling yet whether that's whats going on now - but its worth following.

- Wikipedia: Party Switching in the United States.

Is Obama and the Democrats losing the Millennials?

From the Daily Beast:

If Obamacare never gets fixed, it might just sour the single best relationship the Democratic Party has: its love affair with the young.

To understand why, it’s important to understand the basic paradox of millennial politics. Millennials are the product of what Chris Hayes has called “the fail decade.” Because they came of age watching a Republican president fail massively in Iraq,Hurricane Katrina, and the financial crisis, millennials are predisposed to favor Democrats. Because they’ve entered adulthood in miserable economic times, they’re more likely than their elders to feel that capitalism itself has failed, which predisposes them to favor government intervention in the economy. A November 2011 Pew studyfound that young Americans were more than 20 points more likely than the middle-aged, and a whopping 30 points more likely than the elderly, to favor a bigger, more expensive government over a cheaper, smaller one.

But the same failures that have made young Americans eager for government help also have left them dubious that government can provide it. When a 2009 Center for American Progress study compared millennials to previous generations of young people, it found them significantly less likely to trust government to “do what is right most of the time.” A 2009 National Bureau of Economic Research paper suggests that this paradox is typical of people who enter adulthood during rough economic times. “Recession-stricken individuals on the one hand ask for larger involvement by the state in redistribution,” observed authors Paola Giuliano and Antonio Spilimbergo, “but at the same time are more skeptical of the state institutions’ ability to intervene effectively.”

During Obama’s first term, this contradiction only grew. According to pollsters, young Americans were far more supportive of Obamacare than their elders. But between 2010 and 2013, their faith in government continued to fall.

Until a month ago, it seemed possible that when health-care reform took effect, and young Americans began to feel its positive results, the gap might close. Now it seems likely to widen further. I doubt that means young people will shift toward the GOP in significant numbers anytime soon. Among millennials, the Republican Party’s brand remains horrendous, and almost everything the party has done since Mitt Romney’s loss has made it worse. More fundamentally, few millennials embrace the right’s basic contention that a larger welfare state threatens their freedom and that an unregulated free market will solve their economic woes.

Instead of re-aligning young people, the Obamacare debacle is more likely to de-align them.

If I'm following the argument correctly, the author is implying that young voters will be increasingly likely to tune out of politics, dealign from either of the two parties, which renders them even less powerful than they already are.

The Dish complies reactions to the nuclear option

For one set of reactions click here, for the other click here.

I'll pick some to highlight in the following posts.

GOVT 2305 and 2306 Review, Part One

We started talking about the final in class this week, and will continue to do so. I'll start a series of posts with hints about what things you ought to think about while you review. These will continue until final week starts.

Here are some of the things we discussed - and some things you should review:

2305
- The basic principles embedded in the Constitution
- John Locke and his Two Treatise's on Government
- The Magna Carta and the British Bill of Rights
- The Equal Protection Clause
- Strict Scrutiny


2306
- The purpose of public education according to both the Texas Declaration of Independence and the Texas Constitution
- The impact of the 14th Amendment on the states
- The political culture of Texas
- The differences between the constitutions of 1869 and 1876

Expect more to come - I'll try to add something every day - but think about these items a bit. The more you know the better you'll do.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals rehears Fisher v UT - strict scrutiny must apply

This past summer the Supreme Court sent this case back to the fifth Circuit and asked them to apply strict scrutiny to the case.

The NYT reports:

An affirmative-action program at the University of Texas at Austin that takes applicants’ race into account was unnecessary because the campus had achieved a “critical mass” of minority students, lawyers for the white applicant who sued the university told a federal appeals court here on Wednesday in a case with high stakes for the future of race-conscious admissions policies at public colleges and universities.

University lawyers denied a critical mass of underrepresented students had been reached. They said the institution was entitled to supplement its race-neutral admissions policies with ones that take race into account to achieve diversity. But the reaction of the appeals judges, who expressed skepticism at times about the manner in which the university applied race-conscious decisions and the university’s abstract definition of “critical mass,” illustrated the complex path for the Texas flagship university, as it tries to show that its admissions program was necessary.

Bert Rein, the lawyer for the white applicant, Abigail Fisher, said the university had no numerical standards to determine when its student body was sufficiently diverse. “They have no metric,” he said. “ ‘We know it when we see it.’ That’s the university’s position.”

The lawyers for Ms. Fisher, the university and minority student groups appeared before the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit on Wednesday to sort through a tangle of new legal issues raised by the Supreme Court in June. The Supreme Court sent the case back to the Fifth Circuit, instructing it to apply a greater degree of scrutiny to the university’s race-conscious admissions program.

The decision, while generally upholding the use of race as a factor in the program, jeopardized the future of it at the same time, by instructing courts to use tougher standards and to verify that race-neutral alternatives were not available to the university.

The Senate Goes Nuclear

From the NYT:

The Senate voted on Thursday to eliminate the use of the filibuster against most presidential nominees, a move that will break the Republican blockade of President Obama’s picks to cabinet posts and the federal judiciary. The change is the most fundamental shift in the way the Senate functions in more than a generation.

The vote was one that members of both parties had threatened for the better part of a decade, but had always stopped short of carrying out. This time, with little left of the bipartisan spirit that helped seal compromises on filibuster rule changes in the past, there was no last-minute deal to be struck.

The vote was 52 to 48.

Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, set the change in motion on Thursday with a series of procedural steps.

“The need for change is so, so very obvious. It is clearly visible,” Mr. Reid said as the Senate convened Thursday morning. “It is time to get the Senate working.”

Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, denounced Democrats for trying to “break the rules to change the rules” as a way to distract the public from the president’s political problems over his health care law.

“You think this is in the best interest of the United States Senate and the American people?” Mr. McConnell asked, sounding incredulous. “I say to my friends on the other side of the aisle, you’ll regret this. And you may regret it a lot sooner than you think.”

The gravity of the situation was reflected in a highly unusual scene on the Senate floor: Nearly all 100 senators were in their seats, rapt as their two leaders debated.

Tensions between the two parties have reached a boiling point in the last few weeks as Republicans repeatedly filibustered Mr. Obama’s picks to the country’s most important appeals court, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The Senate has voted on three nominees to the court in the last month. Republicans have blocked them all, saying they would allow the president no more appointments to that court.

Tensions between the two parties have reached a boiling point in the last few weeks as Republicans repeatedly filibustered Mr. Obama’s picks to the country’s most important appeals court, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The Senate has voted on three nominees to the court in the last month. Republicans have blocked them all, saying they would allow the president no more appointments to that court.

Democrats, who filibustered their own share of Republican judicial nominees before they took control of the Senate, have said that what the minority party has done is to effectively rewrite the law by requiring a 60-vote supermajority threshold for high-level presidential appointments. Once rare, filibusters of high-level nominees are now routine.

With the appeals court left with a bench of just eight full-time judges — there are 11 full-time seats — Democrats argue that Republicans are denying Mr. Obama his constitutional powers to appoint judges and reshaping the nature of the federal judiciary.

The filibuster changes, approved with just a simple majority under a procedural move so contentious it is known as the nuclear option, do not affect Supreme Court nominees.

The Dish links to commentary.

The emerging field of political intelligence - the fastest growing field you've never heard of

The Dish had a recent post telling how to profit from boring subcommittee meetings.

Hire yourself out to large businesses who want quick information about what is happening in these meetings.

From Mother Jones:

As Wall Street has pursued ever more complex ways to make a buck, the political-intelligence industry has boomed, bringing in $402 million in 2009, according to Integrity Research Associates, which tracks the PI sector. That's still small potatoes compared to the $3.3 billion lobbying industry, but it has caught the eye of critics who worry that it amounts to selling special access to the public's business. "This is basically the kind of thing that America hates," says former lobbyist-turned-reformer Jack Abramoff.

Heather Podesta, a corporate lobbyist who once proudly sewed a scarlet "L" on her dress at a Democratic convention party, recalls the moment several years ago when she realized political intel had taken on a life of its own. Hedge funders had packed the audience at a Senate hearing on asbestos legislation. They had no interest in the policy implications; they just wanted to find out first so they could place their bets for or against the asbestos makers. "The whole thing," Podesta tells me at the power-lunch staple Charlie Palmer, "was just so sleazy." Yet so long as they don't veer into insider trading or Abramoff-style shenanigans, the political-intelligence firms aren't breaking any laws. "All they're doing is discovering the information and conveying it," concedes Abramoff, whose influence-peddling schemes swept up a half-dozen Republican lawmakers and landed him in prison. "I'm not even sure if you made it illegal there's any way to enforce it. It's ingenious."

The political-intelligence industry began to take shape in the early 1980s. As federal regulatory power expanded, big business wanted to know what happened in obscure subcommittee hearings—and didn't want to wait for the next day's papers to read about it. In 1984, investment banker Ivan Boesky hired lobbyists to attend committee hearings about a big oil merger and report back to him. It paid off: Boesky made a cool $65 million just by finding out first and buying low. "Investors started to realize that there was money to be made by knowing what was going on in Washington and knowing it as quickly as possible," says Michael Mayhew, the founder of Integrity Research Associates.

Click here for a link to Integrity Research Associates.

From New York Magazine: Senate Republicans: All Obama Judges Are Bad

Senate Republicans are filibustering a third Obama nominee to the DC Circuit Court. Democrats are once again weighing the opinion of changing Senate rules to scale back the filibuster.

For reasons that remain unclear, Senate Republicans have since decided to block Obama’s nominees to the D.C. Circuit Court, the country’s second-most-powerful court, en masse. “There is no reason to upset the current makeup of the court,” argues Charles Grassley. Democrats have “admitted they want to control the court so it will advance the president’s agenda,” says Mitch McConnell.

This – unlike many of the arguments of convenience deployed in such fights — is a perfectly blunt account of both side’s beliefs. Democrats want to nominate judges who share the Democratic legal philosophy, which tends to treat the Democratic policy agenda as constitutional. Republicans want to keep the courts as Republican as possible, because Republican judges are more likely to strike down laws passed by Democrats.

The bluntness of the account reveals its radicalism. Previous judicial fights have revolved around the question: How personally or ideologically unacceptable must a judge be to merit rejection? Republicans are now arguing that Obama’s nominating judges to vacancies on the court is illegitimate per se.

From the Washington Post: Capital gains: Spending on contracts and lobbying propels a wave of new wealth in D .C.

For our look at money in politics available to people who know the inside game:

The avalanche of cash that made Washington rich in the last decade has transformed the culture of a once staid capital and created a new wave of well-heeled insiders.

The winners in the new Washington are not just the former senators, party consiglieri and four-star generals who have always profited from their connections. Now they are also the former bureaucrats, accountants and staff officers for whom unimagined riches are suddenly possible. They are the entrepreneurs attracted to the capital by its aura of prosperity and its super-educated workforce. They are the lawyers, lobbyists and executives who work for companies that barely had a presence in Washington before the boom.

. . . big companies realized that a few million spent shaping legislation could produce windfall profits. They nearly doubled the cash they poured into the capital.

From the Washington Post: Another way to explain who we are: The 15 types of communities that make up America

A companion piece to the one about the 11 "nations" within the US. This looks at the 15 unique cultures of the various counties across the country.

From the New Yorker: On the Face of It: The Psychology of Electability

We just finished talking about how personal characteristics can influence voters. When we cover the media, we will see the impact that television has had on how candidates are evaluated.

Looks matter.

Here's a more exhaustive look at these factors:

In 2003, the Princeton psychologist Alexander Todorov began to suspect that, except for those people who have hard-core political beliefs, the reasons we vote for particular candidates could have less to do with politics and more to do with basic cognitive processes—in particular, perception. When people are asked about their ideal leader, one of the single most important characteristics that they say they look for is competence—how qualified and capable a candidate is. Todorov wondered whether that judgment was made on the basis of intuitive responses to basic facial features rather than on any deep, rational calculus. It would make sense: in the past, extensive research has shown just how quickly we form impressions of people’s character traits, even before we’ve had a conversation with them. That impression then colors whatever else we learn about them, from their hobbies to, presumably, their political abilities. In other words, when we think that we are making rational political judgments, we could be, in fact, judging someone at least partly based on a fleeting impression of his or her face.

Starting that fall, and through the following spring, Todorov showed pairs of portraits to roughly a thousand people, and asked them to rate the competence of each person. Unbeknownst to the test subjects, they were looking at candidates for the House and Senate in 2000, 2002, and 2004. In study after study, participants’ responses to the question of whether someone looked competent predicted actual election outcomes at a rate much higher than chance—from sixty-six to seventy-three per cent of the time. Even looking at the faces for as little as one second, Todorov found, yielded the exact same result: a snap judgment that generally identified the winners and losers. Todorov concluded that when we make what we think of as well-reasoned voting decisions, we are actually driven in part by our initial, instinctive reactions to candidates.

From The Dish: Police State Watch

Andrew Sullivan reports on a case where a drug sniffing dog made the wrong call. Police were led to believe - incorrectly - that a person they pulled over had hidden drugs up his backside, and took invasive procedures to try to find them. Which they did not, since there were none.

He was billed for the services.

The person searched seems to have limited ability to because policy have qualified immunity from lawsuits.

Is there a "drug war exception" to the Fourth Amendment?

These incidents raise troubling questions about how the criminal justice system and medical establishment could allow for such extreme and invasive measures based on such little suspicion for nonviolent drug offenses. Oddly, according to constitutional scholars and medical ethicists I've consulted, the indignities imposed upon Eckert and Young were both illegal and unethical. And yet it also may be that (a) none of the law enforcement officials or medical personnel responsible for the violations are likely to be held accountable in any way, and (b) they could probably do it all again tomorrow, and still wouldn't likely be held accountable.

The Legal Issues

Any discussion of the legal issues involved in these cases needs to begin with the general evisceration of the Bill of Rights wrought by the drug war. There's a reason why some constitutional law scholars refer a "drug war exception" to the Fourth Amendment. Over the last 45 years, the U.S. Supreme Court has generally taken the approach that drugs are such an existential threat to American society that some basic and inherent rights need to be suspended in order to facilitate their eradication.

From the Death Penalty Information Center: The 2% Death Penalty: How a Minority of Counties Produce Most Death Cases At Enormous Costs to All

Some of this we already knew, but according to this report a small number of counties are responsible for most of the death penalty cases in the United States.

Harris County makes the list, but the report raises questions about the fairness of the system and whether the HPD crime lab has produced tainted evidence for prosecutors. Some people convicted of murder have since been exonerated.

Story probably helps illustrate how the political culture in the local area differs from that elsewhere and nationally.

The Huffington Post reviews the report:

The county that's home to Houston is also the most execution-friendly county in America. Under former District Attorney Johnny B. Holmes and his infamous handlebar mustache, Harris County by itself sent more people to death row (more than 200) than all 49 states other than Texas. When reform-minded District Attorney Pat Lykos (a pro-death penalty Republican, by the way) took over in 2008, she set out to look for innocent people convicted under the lock-'em-up-and-throw-away-the-key approach of her predecessors. Since 2008, there have been 11 exonerations Harris County.

The county has also been beset by scandals at its crime lab. In 2002, an investigation "found cases in which lab results appeared to have been changed to bolster police testimony in criminal cases." As Houston defense attorney John T. Floyd explains, five years later ...

On June 13, 2007, former U.S. Justice Department Inspector Michael Bromwich issued a 400-page report that concluded the crime lab’s DNA and serology departments had made hundreds of “serious and pervasive” mistakes in homicide and sexual assault cases. Bromwich two-year investigation examined more than 3500 cases processed by the crime lab over the previous quarter century. 135 of those were DNA cases handled by the crime lab between 1992 and 2002, Bromwich’s investigators found “major issues” in 43 of those cases, and, even more disturbing, found “major issues” in 4 of the 18 death penalty cases it examined . . .

For more than two decades forensic analysts with the lab appear to have deliberately presented false or misleading testimony designed to satisfy the District Attorney’s Office need for a conviction. And when the analysts were not giving false testimony, they were neglecting to conduct tests that would have either exonerated the accused or cast doubt on the test findings the prosecution needed for conviction.

As late as April 2013, Harris County was investigating how a crime lab technician remained on the job for years, helping to win convictions in thousands of cases, despite "a high error rate," and "a dubious understanding of the chemistry involved in the job."

Lykos was defeated last year in her bid for reelection, in part because of her efforts to divert first-time DWI offenders, and a policy of not pressing felony charges for "trace" amounts of drugs. Former state judge Mike Anderson beat Lykos in the Republican primary with a promise to return to "the good old days," by which he presumably meant Holmes and his death penalty machine.

In a training session for his assistant district attorneys, conducted earlier this year, Anderson was captured on video giving tribute to Holmes. At one point, he celebrated how Holmes didn't press criminal charges against the Houston police officers who shot and killed Pedro Navaro in 1998. Navarro was unarmed. The police shot the 22-year-old man 21 times during a botched drug raid -- nine times in the back.

Anderson then referred to the Innocence Project -- a group that works to get innocent people out of prison and off death row -- as the "enemy" of prosecutors. He also went on to praise prosecutors who fought against DNA testing in innocence cases. Harris County was already known among prosecutors for negotiating the destruction of DNA evidence into plea bargains, meaning that innocent suspects coerced into false confessions couldn't later ask for the tests that could clear their names. The Houston Chronicle editorialized that the video confirmed critics' "worst fears" about returning to the conviction culture that we now know produced so many exonerations.

Anderson passed away in October. His widow Devon was appointed to replace him, and now serves as the Harris County DA.

Written Assignment #5 - 8 week classes

Get me a rough draft of your 1000 word essay by November 29th.

The sooner you get it to me, the sooner I can get comments to you so you can make the necessary revisions.

Its dangerous to get in the way Houston

The Houston Chronicle has a fun photo spread on some old towns that were swallowed up by an ever expanding Houston.

It helps explain many of the names of neighborhoods and highways around the city.

It reminds me that one of the many aspects of municipal government that we did not get into this semester was extra territorial jurisdiction, which refers to the rules related to annexation - something Houston has done since its inception in 1836.

Some related stories:

- Annexation Plan - Houston.
- Control in the ETJ.
- Katy plans to talk with Houston about annexation.

Jobs, Growth & Freedom Fund

Also in 2305, we covered campaign finance and discussed the rise of political action committees (PACs) as a response to limits on campaign donation from labor unions and corporations in the

We mentioned a couple different types of PACs - Super PACs and Leadership PACs - and I suggested that our junior Senator Ted Cruz very likely has one set up. I was right - its called the Jobs, Growth & Freedom Fund. Its an indication that the senator intends to build influence over others in Congress. The more he has in his PAC, the more money he raise, the more he can distribute to his allies in Congress. Or potential allies.

As a reminder, here is a definition of a Leadership PAC:

Politicians collect money for their own campaigns — we all know that. But many of them also raise a separate pot of money, commonly called a leadership political action committee, to help other politicians. By making donations to members of their party, ambitious lawmakers can use their leadership PACs to gain clout among their colleagues and boost their bids for leadership posts or committee chairmanships. Politicians also use leadership PACs to lay the groundwork for their own campaigns for higher office. And some use their PACs to hire additional staff—sometimes even their family members—and to travel around the country or eat in some of Washington's finest restaurants. The limits on how a politician can spend leadership PAC money are not especially strict.

The Center for Responsive Politics has detail about the money the PAC has on hand and what it has spent:

Total Receipts	$313,323
Total Spent	$129,786
Begin Cash on Hand	$0
End Cash on Hand	$183,537
Debts	$0
Date of last report	June 30, 2013

Click here for info on Ted Cruz.

For more on the PAC, click on these:

- Cruz gears up fundraising machine
- Ted Cruz raises $1.19 million in third quarter.
- A late invitation to a fundraiser - we missed it, sorry.
- Ted Cruz Joins Freshmen Forming Leadership PACs
- The Ted Cruz Filibuster Paid Off — for Ted Cruz!

From The American Prospect: Fifty Shades of Purple

Recently in 2305 we discussed the two party system and its decentralized nature. We toyed with the possibility that since each party has a presence in each of the fifty states, it might be best to say that the United States has a 100 party system (50 states x 2 parties in each - in case you didn't figure this out yourself). Each state party has a degree of autonomy and can determine for itself what it stands for - usually this is determined by which groups are especially powerful in the state, and what issue positions help win elections.

But even though each party has a presence in each state, they are not competitive in each. Republicans dominate some states (like Texas) while Democrats dominate others (like California). There are only a handful of states where there is a close balance between the two - Florida and Ohio for example.

This author from the American Prospect thinks this is a problem and that democracy would be better served if each party was competitive in each of the fifty states. The roots of government dysfunction might be found in this lack of competition:

The real winner, if the parties started competing for votes across the map, wouldn’t be Republicans or Democrats; it would be small-d democracy. Voter turnout would surely rise. When only one party is courting them, voters disconnect. In 2012 battleground states, where both parties poured resources into voter outreach and engagement, turnout was high. In Ohio, 65 percent of the voting-eligible population cast a ballot; in Virginia, 66 percent did; and in Colorado, a whopping 70 percent turned out. But one-party states like Texas (50 percent) and California (55 percent) were both below the national average.

Voters can’t hold elected officials accountable if their party affiliation virtually assures their re-election. A weak opposition party can’t serve as an effective watchdog on those in power, either. Politicians in unchallenged parties also tend to move to ideological extremes. When general elections are largely decided in party primaries, as they are in Illinois and Texas, small numbers of highly motivated voters can carry the day; that’s how the Tea Party took over the Republican Party in states like Texas. It’s what elected Ted Cruz and what emboldened him to orchestrate an unpopular government shutdown without having to worry about his own political future. In the strange world that noncompetitive politics has wrought, Cruz is doing precisely what Republican primary voters back home elected him to do.

Neither party, of course, will pursue a 50-state strategy because it thinks such a plan is good for democracy. But we’re at a juncture when both believe they can benefit from talking to voters they’ve long ignored. If the parties embraced 50-state strategies, rather than putting most of their resources into a handful of battlegrounds like Ohio and Florida, who would gain the most by 2020 or 2030? It’s impossible to say. Democrats would win over a lot of people simply by giving them a reason to vote. Republicans might acquire even more converts by revising their message to appeal to Latinos and other voters who have written them off. One thing’s for sure, though: American politics would be a lot healthier.

Its doesn't matter if the Tea Party is unpopular, it is still powerful

Thus concludes The Dish in comparing two articles. One points out that 56% of Americans hold a negative view of the Tea Party, the other points out that 2/3rds of those who report voting in the Republican primaries consider themselves members of the movement.

We discussed this in 2305 last week. Turnout is power.

A LIVING DEATH Life without Parole for Nonviolent Offenses

A report from the ACLU.

Pennsylvania paper retracts 1863 editorial critical of the Gettysburg Address

After 150 years they decided it was ok after all.

The original editorial is worth a read. It reminds us how divisive a figure Lincoln was at the time.

From the Houston Chronicle: Political donors paying way

Chronicle writer Patricia Kilday Hart points out the unopposed incumbent legislators still receive a healthy campaign donations and live very well off them.

State Sen. Troy Fraser’s 2012 campaign disclosure reports read like a script from “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.” There’s the private airplane, the expensive automobile lease, the lush Hill Country country club, not to mention swanky dinners at Austin’s Eddie V’s, or Venice, Italy’s Trattori do Forni.

The bills were all paid by someone else, namely campaign donors such as gambling interests, payday lenders and the Koch Industries political action committee, which gave nearly $400,000 to Fraser’s political account in 2012.

There’s just one catch: Fraser, a Republican from Horseshoe Bay, didn’t have a political opponent in 2012, either in the primary or general election. He is one of 40 lawmakers identified by the Houston Chronicle to have avoided any political opposition during that election cycle.

Despite the lack of a political threat, this group of legislators collectively raised $9.4 million in campaign dollars and spent $5.8 million. Much of the money paid for cellphones, plane trips, meals, car leases, car washes and Austin apartments in a year between legislative sessions. Campaigns even picked up the tab for charitable donations, wedding and graduation gifts, and funeral flowers.

“Lawmakers are living high on the hog at their contributor’s expense,” said Tom “Smitty” Smith, director of Public Citizen’s Texas office. “And the contributors are inevitably repaid in favors done on the floor of the House and Senate — or more frequently in back rooms where bills are scheduled or killed when nobody is looking.”

Campaign rules in Texas limit the ability of campaign funds to be used for personal purposes, but its a limit that is easily ignored. The Texas Ethics Commission has a very loose definition of personal use.

Not a nation of moderates - and little evidence of a political realignment

The Dish flags a paper by some political scientists who challenge the idea that we are a nation of moderates. It depends on how you measure moderation. They also argue against the notion the recent elections - like Obama's reelection in 2012 - indicate a political realignment is underway that will likely favor the Democratic Party. These two arguments are related.

If you measure it alone one dimension - for example social or economic ideology - then moderates rule, but reality is more complex. The political world not contains your standard liberals and conservatives, it also contains libertarians, populists and moderates. The former two complicate things. Libertarians are liberal on social issues and conservative on economic issues, populists are the reverse. People may be moderate on economic issues, but extreme on social issues, or vice versa. People who are moderate on both social and economic issues are very rare.

This graph purports to explain that fact:

From The American Prospect: The Forty Year Slump

A sobering look at the decline in middle and lower class wages over past 40 years.

Written Assignment #12 - 16 week classes

I posted this yesterday on blackboard, but in case you missed it I want you to submit a rough draft of your 1000 word report by next Monday the 25th.

From the Congressional Research Service: Membership of the 113 th Congress: A Profile

Here's a demographic breakdown of the members of the 113th Congress.

Here's a chunk of what you'll find in the document. It concerns what occupations members of Congress had prior to election:

• at least 100 congressional staffers (20 in the Senate, 80 in the House), as well as
8 congressional pages (4 in the House and 4 in the Senate);
• 5 Peace Corps volunteers, all in the House;
• 3 sheriffs and 1 deputy sheriff, 2 FBI agents (all in the House), and a firefighter
in the Senate;
• 2 physicists, 6 engineers, and 1 microbiologist (all in the House, with the
exception of 1 Senator who is an engineer);
• 5 radio talk show hosts (4 House, 1 Senate), 6 radio or television broadcasters (5
House, 1 Senate), 7 reporters or journalists (5 in the House, 2 in the Senate), and
a radio station manager and a public television producer (both in the House);
• 9 accountants in the House and 2 in the Senate;
• 5 software company executives, all in the House;
• 3 pilots, all in the House, and 1 astronaut, in the Senate;
• a screenwriter, a comedian, and a documentary film maker, all in the Senate, and
a professional football player, in the House;
• 29 farmers, ranchers, or cattle farm owners (25 House, 4 Senate);
• 2 almond orchard owners, both in the House, 1 cattle farm owner (a Senator), 1
vintner (a House Member), 1 fisherman (a House Member), and 1 fruit orchard
worker (a House Member);
• 7 social workers in the House and 2 in the Senate; and
• 9 current members of the military reserves (8 House, 1 Senate), and 6 current
members of the National Guard (all in the House)

From the TSHA: Historic World War II pipelines sold

The Texas State Historical Association tells us that on this day in 1947 the Big Inch and Little Inch pipelines were sold by the US government to a private company - Texas Eastern Transmission Corporation, which was headquartered in Houston. Both pipelines also connected Houston with the northeast, which helped solidify Houston as the center of the oil and gas industry.

This might be an interesting read for both 2305 and 2306 students. 2305 students should consider the interplay of interests involved in the construction of the pipeline before and during WW2, and the decision about what to do with the pipeline once the war was over. 2306 students ought to think about the role government policies played in the development of the local area and the degree to which local power brokers were able to ensure that these policies benefited them, as well as the local area.

WW2 was very good for the local economy and the business interests located here.

Here's the note sent out by the TSHA:

On this day in 1947, the Big Inch and Little Big Inch, two strategic pipelines laid during World War II from East Texas to the Northeast, were sold by the U.S. government to a private company. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes realized as early as 1940 that shipment of petroleum to the Northeast by tankers would be impossible in time of war because of German submarines. In 1941, at Ickes's urging, oil industry executives began to plan the building of two pipelines. One, twenty-four inches in diameter, called the Big Inch, transported crude oil. The other, twenty inches in diameter, called the Little Big Inch, transported refined products. The Big Inch ran from Longview to Southern Illinois, thence to Phoenixville, Pennsylvania. Twenty-inch lines continued from there to New York City and Philadelphia. The Little Big Inch began in the refinery complex between Houston and Port Arthur and ended in Linden, New Jersey. Together the pipelines carried over 350 million barrels of crude oil and refined products to the East Coast before the war in Europe ended in August 1945.

And from the TSHA entry on the Big Inch and Little Inch Pipelines:

After the war, the pipelines became the focus of a clash of interest groups, with the oil and gas industry wanting to convert them to natural-gas pipelines and the railroad and coal industries opposing this. The Surplus Property Administration, given the task of determining future use, hired an engineering firm to study options; this study recommended that the pipelines be converted to natural-gas transmission. At the same time the United States Senate held hearings on their future use. In January 1946 the SPA recommended that first preference should be to continue use as in the war to ensure availability of the lines in a national emergency. However, by June 1946 the War Assets Administration announced an auction for the lines. All bids were ultimately rejected because no defined use preference had been established. After a strike by coal miners in November 1946 the WAA solicited bids to lease the lines, with Tennessee Gas and Transmission Company awarded a lease for natural-gas use to run from December 3, 1946, to April 30, 1947. Once it was established that the lines were viable for natural-gas transmission, the WAA again offered them for auction. The high bid of $143,127,000 came from a new corporation, Texas Eastern Transmission Corporation, formed by George Rufus and Herman Brown and their partners. The purchase was final on November 14, 1947. As of 1993, Texas Eastern had its headquarters in Houston.

Newspapers may not be so resilient

From the Washington Post, another story pointing out the difficulties newspapers face in the digital age:

Earlier this year, Rupert Murdoch's media empire -- spanning television, newspapers, and Web sites across America and the Commonwealth -- split into two. Investors had pushed for the change, figuring that the broadcasting assets could do better without being shackled to the financially challenged publishing side. Murdoch finally acquiesced, but put a positive spin on it, declaring that the future of newspapers was bright.

Well, maybe, but there's not much evidence of it yet. The resulting television-focused company, 21st Century Fox, earlier this month reported strong revenue growth with profits hampered only by new investments in a sports network designed to rival ESPN. And Monday, the severed Newscorp disappointed analysts' already low expectations, with revenue declining 3 percent overall after poor advertising sales and a particularly huge drop in its Australian newspapers.

"We collectively recognize the need to evolve," said chief executive Robert Thomson, on the company's earnings call, talking up how the company is making progress on mobile and introducing new subscription models.

The resilience of radio

We will be looking at the press and the media in 2305 soon enough and here's a story pointing out that most everyone uses a media technology that's over 100 years old. This despite the fact that its death has been predicted many times.

A TED talk on the impact of markets on civil life

A political philosopher argues that using market mechanisms for providing more and more services and good compounds the problem of inequality in society.

It's a good way to spend 15 minutes, give it a listen.

Wage theft vote scheduled for Houston city council

Salon reports on the vote - which was one of the items Mayor Parker announced would be on her agenda when she was re-elected last week:

“It looks like we do have the votes that we need to pass this, and there has been a lot of interest from council members across the aisle,” Laura Perez-Boston, who directs the Fe Y Justicia (Faith and Justice) Worker Center, told Salon Monday. Still, Perez-Boston said the group was “worried about” the impact of recent testimony against the bill by business groups. “So you know, we’re just trying to make sure that council members are really listening to their constituents,” she said, “and seeing the value of how putting this type of a protection in place would really protect responsible businesses, working families, and just the general economy.” She noted it was also possible that a member would use a “tag” to delay the vote for a week.

As I’ve reported, wage theft scrutiny and activism is on the rise, spurred in part by the growth of non-union low-wage workers’ groups using media, legal, political and workplace pressure to try to improve jobs. Chicago last year passed one of the country’s strongest municipal ordinances to address the issue, threatening convicted wage theft violators with the loss of their business licenses. In interviews with advocates, academics and the progressive National Employment Law Project in 2008, 68 percent of low-wage workers in the country’s three largest cities reported wage theft in the prior week. The term can refer to legal violations like requiring workers to work off the clock, or not paying overtime. University of Oregon labor economist Gordon Lafer wrote in a report last month for the progressive Economic Policy Institute that the statistics suggest “the amount of money stolen out of employees’ paychecks every year is far greater than the combined total stolen in all the bank robberies, gas station robberies, and convenience stores robberies in the country

Chicago passed a similar ordinance earlier this year:

“Now the bosses are going to know that the workers have rights, too,” said Maria Garcia, a member of the labor group Arise Chicago, which spearheaded the campaign to pass the law. Interviewed in Spanish, Garcia said she’d experienced wage theft at both of the past two restaurants where she’d worked.

“Wage theft” encompasses a range of offenses. Garcia said that in her case, it had included unpaid overtime and hourly rates below the minimum wage. The term was popularized by labor activists seeking to stir moral outrage at the all-too common issue: “Wage theft” suggests that refusing to pay wages that workers have earned is a form of robbery, rather than a mere accounting dispute. Recent years have seen increasing traction for campaigns to strengthen wage theft penalties and remedies. Those efforts have also inspired a counter-attack: Last year, Florida Republicans and big businesses pushed a bill that would have overridden local wage theft measures. “We believe the existing court system is the best place for these claims,” a spokesperson for the Florida Retail Federation told the Huffington Post.

But in Florida, business groups have gone to the state legislature to try to override these local ordinances.

Labor’s wage theft efforts elsewhere have provoked pushback from big business. As Lafer noted in his EPI paper, Republicans in the Florida Legislature repeatedly tried to override local wage theft ordinances like a landmark law passed by Miami-Dade County, which created a streamlined process for wage theft claims and offered wronged workers double damages. The message of such preemption efforts, Lafer argued to Salon, is “we don’t want you to have any viable mechanism by which to get back wages that were stolen from you.”

Can Elizabeth Warren drive a wedge within the Democratic Party?

Most of our attention in class has been focused on the wedge between the business and Tea Party wing of the Republican Party, but the Massachusetts Senator might do something similar to the Democratic Party.

Business interests have been as cozy with centrist Democrats as they have been with Republicans. Bill Clinton - and presumably Hillary - have been supported by them, and have each beaten back attempts by the left wing in the party to impose restrictions on business activities. Warren's repeated attacks on the financial sector - and the support they've enjoyed - have raised the possibility that a left wing populist movement might emerge to challenge Clinton, and perhaps divide the party.

We've used to drive home the idea that each of the two parties are coalitions composed of various factions that more or less see eye to eye - though they come into conflict often about what the party should stand for and how it should achieve its objectives.

Some readings:

- Could Elizabeth Warren beat Hillary Clinton?
- Elizabeth Warren’s populist insurgency enters next phase

From Wonkblog: Obamacare is in much more trouble than it was one week ago

A list of 12 problems the ACA faces according to WP's Ezra Klein.

"The Eleven States of Violence"

That's the title Andrew Sullivan gave to this study in Tufts Magazine which tries to uncover the roots of the different responses to violence across the states. The approach should sound familiar to 2306 students - its similar to the approach to political culture we looked at in the beginning of the class. Different areas respond in different ways, and these differences can be traced back to the circumstances of the settlement in each area:

. . . the incidence of violence, like so many salient issues in American life, varies by region. Beyond a vague awareness that supporters of violent retaliation and easy access to guns are concentrated in the states of the former Confederacy and, to a lesser extent, the western interior, most people cannot tell you much about regional differences on such matters. Our conventional way of defining regions—dividing the country along state boundaries into a Northeast, Midwest, Southeast, Southwest, and Northwest—masks the cultural lines along which attitudes toward violence fall. These lines don’t respect state boundaries. To understand violence or practically any other divisive issue, you need to understand historical settlement patterns and the lasting cultural fissures they established.

The original North American colonies were settled by people from distinct regions of the British Isles—and from France, the Netherlands, and Spain—each with its own religious, political, and ethnographic traits. For generations, these Euro-American cultures developed in isolation from one another, consolidating their cherished religious and political principles and fundamental values, and expanding across the eastern half of the continent in nearly exclusive settlement bands. Throughout the colonial period and the Early Republic, they saw themselves as competitors—for land, capital, and other settlers—and even as enemies, taking opposing sides in the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Civil War.

There’s never been an America, but rather several Americas—each a distinct nation. There are eleven nations today. Each looks at violence, as well as everything else, in its own way.

Texas is in four distinct regions. We are in the Deep South. Here's what that means:

Established by English slave lords from Barbados, Deep South was meant as a West Indies–style slave society. This nation offered a version of classical Republicanism modeled on the slave states of the ancient world, where democracy was the privilege of the few and enslavement the natural lot of the many. Its caste systems smashed by outside intervention, it continues to fight against expanded federal powers, taxes on capital and the wealthy, and environmental, labor, and consumer regulations.

Sullivan argues that this map proves that the US must be a federal system if it is to survive. There are too many differences within the nation for it to survive as a unitary system.

Can the Tea Party recruit competitive candidates?

Apart from Texas and a few other states where Tea Party views seem more mainstream - the movement seems to not be able to attract candidates who can win general elections. This spells trouble for the ability of the party to take advantages of opportunities to gain control of the Senate and expand their lead in the House:

Jonathan Bernstein:

. . . three election cycles in, it’s pretty clear that nominating a candidate favored by Tea Partyers over what they consider “establishment” candidates is a formula for risking Republican disaster. And that it’s not going to change any time soon.

So it was for Christine O’Donnell and Sharron Angle in 2010. So it was with Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock in 2012. And so it’s likely to be with the 2014 crop.

The thing is, four years is plenty of time to develop solid, seasoned candidates. Indeed, once upon a time Marco Rubio was one of those solid, seasoned candidates. Rubio was a successful Florida Republican who had risen rapidly to become speaker of the Florida House; he then adopted the emerging Tea Party and went on to easily win an open U.S. Senate seat. But Rubio’s Tea Party credentials were tarnished because he actually tried to legislate on immigration; while it’s much too early to declare his career in trouble and it wouldn’t be surprising if he still ran a solid race for the Republican presidential nomination, it’s also very easy to imagine him having to fend off a Tea Party primary of his own if he runs for reelection instead of the White House in 2016.

So what do Republicans have for 2014? Matt Bevin, taking on Mitch McConnell in Kentucky, is a first-time candidate; should he win, Republicans would probably lose that seat. In Georgia, Paul Braun in particular is thought by many to be a particularly weak candidate, capable of losing that open seat to Democrat Michelle Nunn if he emerges as the nominee. In Louisiana, Republicans had settled on a solid candidate to challenge Mary Landrieu, but Tea Partyer Rob Maness has jumped in with plenty of serious organizational support.

This is more evidence of the factional basis of parties in the United States, and the ongoing struggle within each over what the party stands for and what tactics they choose to use to advance their agenda.

You probably already know this but . . .

. . . its tough being young and broke: 

Poverty is an astonishingly common experience here in the world's richest country. As I wrote this morning, almost 40 percent of American adults experience it for at least a year by age 60.

But you know who poverty is especially common among? Young adults.

Opportunity in Texas: #1 for business, #38 for people

Two studies which purport top measure opportunity across each state have different things to say about Texas.

CNBC has had Texas #1 in recent surveys for business opportunity, but the measures used as part of the Opportunity Index - which focus on the factors that impact people, not businesses - place Texas far lower among the states.

This illustrates a few things we cover in 2306, namely the types of public policy priorities in the state and the impact of the state's individualistic political culture on state priorities.

From the Washington Monthly:

The Opportunity Index ranks states based on sixteen indicators that Measure of America codirector Kristen Lewis says are essential to the “infrastructure of opportunity” for individuals. These indicators include not just the basics—the availability of jobs, affordable housing, and quality education—but also what a growing body of research shows is critical to upward mobility: social capital and civic life. These factors make up, at the individual level, the equivalent of the “business-friendly” environment that company-focused rankings measure.

The outcomes under the Opportunity Index approach, needless to say, are radically different from those of CNBC. Under the 2013 Opportunity Index, Texas—top ranked in opportunities for business by CNBC—ranks thirty-eighth in opportunities for people. Meanwhile, Vermont, which invests nearly double what Texas does per pupil in K-12 education ($15,096 versus $8,562), ranks first on the Opportunity Index and thirty-second by CNBC.

. . . While some structural differences—such as the level of church membership—are less susceptible to public policy, federal, state, and local policy choices can have profound impacts on whether people have access to the building blocks of upward mobility: decent schools, safe streets, and even access to grocery stores with affordable healthy food. In some neighborhoods of Houston, says a report by Children at Risk, “areas as large as 10 miles have been identified as containing a single food source—gas stations that sell tobacco, alcohol and fatty snacks.” As a tragic—but unsurprising—consequence, as many as 47 percent of Harris County children are obese or overweight.

In the same way that the rankings of the U.S. News & World Report have influenced—for better or for worse—the investments and choices that colleges have made to improve their standings, it’s likely that the multiplicity of business-focused rankings have skewed the policy choices of states eager to attract companies within their borders. Texas, for example, spends $19 billion a year on tax incentives to woo companies to the state, according to the New York Times—at the same time, it cut education spending by $5.4 billion last year. In the last legislative session, Texas lawmakers passed yet more tax cuts, exempting small businesses from franchise taxes, lowering franchise tax rates, and creating a special tax break for data centers doing business in the state. Texas was also among the first states to develop a so-called war chest—the Texas Enterprise Fund—aimed at offering companies incentives to move to the state, along with a smorgasbord of other goodies, including grants and low-cost loans to businesses.

For my 8 week classes: week four's written assignment has been cancelled

Use this time to work on your 1000 word essay.

It's due in less than a month.

From the National Journal: The Whigs Are Partying Like It's 1856

A blast from the past:

The Whigs are making a comeback.

Well, sort of. On Tuesday, 36 Philadelphia voters elected Whig candidate Robert Bucholz as the judge of election for the Fifth Division of the 56th Ward. He beat Democratic opponent Loretta Probasco, who secured 24 votes.

The Whigs haven't been a major political party in the United States since the mid-1800s. The Whigs produced four U.S. presidents in their brief history—William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, Zachary Taylor, and Millard Fillmore—and had several national leaders among its members, including Henry Clay and Daniel Webster.

The party, however, dissolved following the failed presidency of Fillmore that ended in 1853. It also showed deep divides in the party on the issue of slavery.

But in 2007, a group of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans wanted to change that and started the Modern Whig Party.

Its symbol an owl, the party is based in Washington and claims it has 30,000 members across the country. While many of the issues for the party have changed in the last 150 years or so, party members claim its basic political philosophy is the same: moderation and compromise.

. . . A closer comparison of the platforms of the party from 150 years ago to today shows many similarities:

1852:
- Emphasize states rights on most issues.
- Limit foreign entanglements.
- Modernize the economic system through the markets and industrialization.
- Promote higher tariffs on trade, not higher taxes.
- Support a national bank.
- Use government-funded programs to expand the road and canal systems throughout Middle America.
- Create public schools and promote private institutions, like colleges and charities.

2013:

- Give states the power to handles budget issues.
- Develop alternative energy resources and reduce dependency on foreign oil.
- Reform education and add an emphasis on space, oceans, medicine, and nanotechnologies in the public and private sectors.
- Be progressive on social issues, advocating the government stay out of "legislating morality."
- Give veterans proper benefits.

Does Houstons' city charter need to be revised?

This ran a month ago in the Houston Chronicle.

A couple members of Houston's city council think the current design of Houston's government makes governing the city too difficult and would like to see changes which modernize it. They would like to see a Charter Review Commission established to study possibilities. This seems to me a reaction to the limit on government placed when term limits were added a couple decades back as well as an attempt for the city council to assert more control of city government affairs. Perhaps they believe the mayor is too strong.

This is from an editorial written by the council members:

Over the past few years there has been a great deal of discussion among City Hall insiders about amending the city charter to change term limits for mayor, city controller and council members from two-year to four-year terms.

Two-year terms of office, combined with a six-year limit, hurt city government. The churn of frequent turnover disallows sufficient development of institutional knowledge and process know-how that are critical to effective policymaking. Changing the city charter to provide for two four-year terms for city-elected officials may reduce the number of city elections, but it won't make fundamental changes to the local governance process - including operations and the structure of city government - to address accountability and to meaningfully improve long-range infrastructure, financial, emergency and environmental planning in Houston.

But rather than limit ourselves to considering a term-limits charter change amendment, Houston needs a Charter Review Commission to review, update and propose recommendations to the voters to modernize our charter, the structure and operations of city government, with specific attention paid to the budget process.

. . . The commission's membership should be former city elected officials, academic and legal experts on Texas municipal governance, finance and infrastructure issues as well as local business leaders and entrepreneurs. No current elected city official or employee should be allowed to serve on the commission. The work of the commission should not be a political exercise.

Here are the specific questions they would like to see questions addressed by the commission:

- Should one council meeting per month be held in a city multi-service center in the evening, similar to how city Capital Improvement Process meetings are scheduled?

- Should all of Houston's 16 City Council seats go to single-member districts?

- Should the City of Houston consider a city manager form of government?

- Should the five at-large council members be elected to designated positions based on expertise in certain respective policy areas, such as position No. 1 budget and fiscal affairs, No. 2 public safety, No. 3 business development and international affairs, No. 4 transportation and general mobility, and No. 5 housing, land use and community development?

- Should the City Council nominate and elect the mayor pro tem, as this person would succeed the mayor if the person holding office were unable to serve out an unexpired term? If nominated and elected by council, should the mayor pro tem organize council committees by nominating committee members and chairs/vice chairs to be ratified by the full council?

- Should council members, or at least some designated number of council members, have authority to place items on the council agenda? Should all items approved by a council committee be automatically placed on the full council agenda within 30 days of having been voted out of committee?

- Should a budget calendar, with dates and times set for public discussion, be established earlier in the fiscal year?

- Should district council members have a council district service budget to be able to quickly address minor neighborhood issues?

- Should candidates for the City Council, mayor and city controller be required to attend a class or training session on Houston city government organized by a consortium of local universities as a condition for qualifying for the ballot, similar to the filing fee, signature or residency requirements?

If this happens, it will be very instructive to follow the process as it goes forward.

Now that Houston's mayor has been re-elected to a third term, what will she do?

Charles Kuffner weighs in here.

Here's a list of items she intends to take to city council, They are more controversial than items discussed earlier this year - the local agenda can be bland prior to elections. No need to stir the pot excessively. Now that the election is over these can be talked about again (perhaps this is an argument against 2 year terms).

- wage theft
- restrictions on payday and auto lenders
- regulations for food trucks
- nondiscrimination ordinance protecting gay and transgendered residents
- reduce chronic homelessness
- Bayou Greenways
- moving the crime lab from HPD to an independent lab
- develop a city-council inmate center and close two existing facilities
- obtain negotiating authority for city's firefighter pension system
- water conservation