All of the progressive opinion I’m reading is opposed to the ballot measures that Californians will be voting on soon. When I look at each of these propositions, I can certainly understand the recommendation. They all kind of suck. The budget deal that went through a couple of months back was dependent on these measures passing, though. If they don’t pass, the budget deal doesn’t can’t stick and we have to go back to the drawing board…or so I read.

If anyone can answer the following questions with something more than “not my problem”, I would really appreciate it.

1. What happens if all of these props fail?
2. What happens if any one of these props fail?

The current budget is non-viable without them, right? The stubborn refusal of a small minority of Republicans in the state Senate to increase any taxes shows no signs of changing. Does this mean that we go back to looking at massive cuts in state services. That’s the only thing the Republicans in the senate would agree to. Are those massive cuts somehow better than what’s in these props?

The switch by Arlen Specter to the Democratic party is big news. It’s not big news that also requires big analysis. Frankly, the Republican spin on this is probably more accurate than the Specter spin. This was a simple political calculation. If I had to put money on who would have won a Specter vs. Toomey primary battle, I would have put that money on Toomey. Specter barely beat him in 2004. The Obama and Clinton campaigns got a lot of moderates to switch to the Democratic Party. That primary electorate would be even more conservative now than it was six years ago.

In a Specter vs. Toomey general election, Specter probably walks away with it pretty easily.

David and Amy Goodman are on Forum right now. Amy said something today that really irked me. I can’t tell if she’s intentionally being oversimplistic for propaganda purposes or if she has a fundamental blind spot in how the media functions. She said that politicians need reporters more than reporters need politicians. This is only true in the aggregate. Things don’t actually work in the aggregate. Let me explain. If you put all reporters in a bucket and all politicians in another bucket, what she said would be true. The reporters have a platform and the politicians would need to access that platform. If all of the reporters chose to act in unison, they could make or break anyone or everyone in that bucket of politicians. While it is true that often, especially if we limit our survey to the so-called mainstream media, a really large majority of the reporters end up acting in unison, it’s not because they conspired to do so at the beginning of any particular story. As is achingly true all too often with theories that evolve from the conventional left mindset of the 70s and earlier, this theory of media operation ignores individual agency. In a system where ratings and advertising dollars drive the media, individual reporters’ success or failure depends on their ability to bring in eyeballs. When you pull your media figures and your politicians out of the buckets that we put them into, individual reporters need access to individual politicians more than is the true of the reverse. Way more. I hate the neo-liberal tendency to put all things into market terminology, but I think this is a simple case of supply and demand. There are way more media figures than there are politicians. There is a scarcity of politicians relative to the abundance of reporters.