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Monday, November 10, 2008
Merle Haggard, precious memories how they linger
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I’ve always been a sucker for the Bakersfield sound, and I’ve also long been of the opinion that they stopped making real country music somewhere ‘round 1980 … but I digress.
The news that Merle Haggard, 71, is recovering from lung-cancer surgery is a bit sobering (for me, if not for Merle). I’ve seen him a couple of times in concert, missed him a third time when he didn’t show, which is a story almost any Merle fan can tell.
He’s always been an ornery type, but there’s no question about his talent or impact. Listening to Merle is like sipping on a good bourbon — mellow with a bite to it. So, to wrap up this Monday, another work day is over: Merle playing Lefty — you can’t get much more roots than that:
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The highs and lows of political life
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
President Bush and President-elect Barack Obama met at the White House today, a meeting that as Gallup puts it “presents a remarkable contrast between one of the least popular two-term presidents in modern times at the close of his administration, and one of the most popular candidates to win the presidency.”
“According to Gallup Poll Daily tracking from Nov. 6-8, only 27 percent of Americans approve of the job Bush is doing as president. This contrasts with the 70 percent of Americans holding a favorable view of Obama….
Additionally, nearly two-thirds of Americans say they are confident in Obama’s ability to be a good president, similar to his 70 percent favorable reading.”
Only 25 percent of those polled said they had an unfavorable impression of Obama, a segment that must have included a pretty good cross-section of people posting on this blog.
As Gallup points out, Bush’s ratings have set records both for how low they have fallen and how long they have remained at those levels. I doubt history will judge him any easier.
Obama’s ratings will probably never be so high once he takes office and has to start making tough decisions. But that wave of good feeling he’s riding at the moment could help him get a lot done pretty quickly in Washington. He shows every sign of wanting to spend that capital.
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168,785 missing voters in Senate race
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Here’s a strange number:
More than 168,000 Georgia voters went to the polls on Nov. 4 and cast ballots for president, then walked out without bothering to cast a vote in the highly advertised U.S. Senate race between Saxby Chambliss and Jim Martin.
That seems like a lot — an undervote of 4.3 percent. To put it in context, in a Senate race in 2004 pitting Johnny Isakson against Denise Majette, the undervote here in Georgia was only 2.3 percent.
So maybe this was an ‘08 phenomenon, something unique to the heightened emotions of the Obama-McCain race?
That doesn’t appear to be the explanation either. Minnesota, with a hotly contested Senate race between Norm Coleman and Al Franken, reported only 14,000 undervotes, a rate of 0.5 percent. The same pattern holds with most other states with tough Senate races.
In North Carolina, the Senate undervote was 1.1 percent of the presidential total. In Oregon it was 3.3 percent, and 2.3 percent in New Hampshire. The only state where the total approached Georgia’s was Louisiana, at 4.0 percent.
So who were these people? Were they Obama voters who just cast their ballots for their favorite and walked out? The evidence for that is weak. In Fulton County, which went for Obama by more than 2-1, the undervote was 2.85 percent, lower than the undervote rate in McCain counties such as Cobb (3.4 percent) and Cherokee (3.1 percent). In DeKalb County the rate was 4.4 percent, about the state average.
So what’s YOUR explanation?
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Truth even more important in wartime
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The media get blamed for a lot of things, and that’s OK. We dish out the criticism freely, and sometimes we get too thin-skinned about facing return fire.
In some cases, though, we get blamed simply for being the messenger. It is not the media’s fault, for example, that Sarah Palin wasn’t qualified to be vice president. We didn’t pick her, and it’s not our fault that, according to the McCain campaign staff, she didn’t know that Africa was a continent.
Back in the early days of the Iraq war, you may recall, the media also got a lot of criticism for “not reporting all the good things that were happening in Iraq.” Everybody from the president and generals to actor Bruce Willis and citizens writing letters to the editor were complaining about the harsh reports coming out of Baghdad and Anbar province.
There were insinuations and even allegations of treason, and claims that the left-wing media wanted the United States to lose the war or were simply playing out their anti-Bush bias. Conservative commentators such as Ralph Peters, a former infantry officer, claimed that “the body count cherished by the media is the number of our own troops dead and wounded,” suggesting that reporters were playing into al-Qaida’s hands.
But what happened next is important. That reporting created a political momentum for change in both U.S. strategy and leadership. After the ‘06 midterm elections, President Bush finally ended months of denial and acknowledged the truth, that events in Iraq were spiraling out of control and that “the situation in Iraq is unacceptable to the American people and it is unacceptable to me.”
Bush fired Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defense, appointed a new commanding general for Iraq in David Petraeus, and announced what came to be known as the surge.
Whatever the future holds for Iraq, it is undeniably a more secure place today than it was a few years ago. And it was the media, doing its duty by reporting honestly, that helped create the political space and political momentum to allow that change to take place.
A similar dynamic could be seen recently in Afghanistan. After a firefight and aerial assault in a village called Azizabad, initial reports from the U.S. military insisted that civilian deaths had been minimal, an account confirmed by Oliver North with a Fox News crew in the area. But when Afghani sources insisted otherwise, claiming a significant number of deaths to women and children, U.S. media reported those claims as well.
To some, the media was once again playing into the hands of al-Qaida. But forced to look further by pressure from the Afghan government and the media, the U.S. military discovered that the Afghani version of events appears to have been closer to the truth. Because of that discovery, U.S. rules involving use of air power have changed for the better, reducing the risk of civilian casualties and thus improving American hopes for success in the region.
Denying the truth, as some tried to do, would have saved the United States some embarrassment and criticism in the short term, but it also would have allowed the previous policy to continue, with long-term harm to our interests.
The American system is built on a faith in the truth. And while none of us can know that truth in its entirety, we do know that our nation’s best interests are not served by trying to silence information either through government rule or by public intimidation.
That applies across the board. At the moment, conservatives have worked themselves into a frenzy at the thought that Democrats might try to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine. That rule, abolished in 1987, required broadcast outlets to give equal amounts of time to competing viewpoints. Conservatives fear that if the policy is reinstated, it will doom conservative talk radio.
Personally, I think that fear has been ginned up by the conservatives themselves to satisfy their need to feel persecuted. If Democrats really did try to push such a change, it would be both a big surprise and a foolish mistake, and I expect it wouldn’t get very far.
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