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.

I had planned to take lunch at about 12:30 today, but I was working on a project and looked up and found that it was well past 2:00. I turned on Hardball. I am somewhere between amused and frustrated (but mostly amused) at watching the northeastern media elite try to parse the current, controversial statements from Sarah Palin. For better or worse, growing up in the south means that I generally understand what evangelicals mean when they open their mouths. The coded way in which they often speak means that you have to be precise in parsing their words.

Sarah Palin said, in reference to the folks at the McCain campaign that she couldn’t find anyone that she wanted to hold hands and pray with. Repeatedly, Chris Matthews and his guests have stated this as “she couldn’t find anyone to pray with” and then saying that she’s accusing the McCain staff of being godless or something. The operative word in this context is “want”. It’s a judgment that is as much about social attitudes and relationships as it is about religion. Where religion comes in on the thing isn’t “I’m a Christian and you’re not”. It’s something closer to “you’re not my kind of Christian”.

I just watched the series finale for Battlestar Galactica today. I had managed to avoid seeing any spoilers and any discussion of the finale so far. Though I don’t intend to disclose any detailed spoilers, you should stop reading now if you want pristine mind going into the thing.

I hated it. My strongest belief about humanity is that learning and creativity define us as a species. From the earliest bone tools onward, learning and creativity result in technology. We can debate whether specific technologies are used for good or ill. I do not endorse fully unrestricted use of any technology that we can come up with. To me, the BSG finale had a maddening luddite streak to it. It managed to be both nihilistic and naive at the same time. For a show that did such a grand job of examining what it means to be human, the finale was disgustingly anti-humanistic. I’d like to just forget it. I can think of few shows that I’ve really loved which have managed to disappoint me so thoroughly with a planned series finale. There have been plenty of times where I wished things had ended differently for specific characters, where their ultimate fate was counter to the tone of the show or the arc of a specific character. I’m still bothered by the way Wes died in the Angel finale. I’m not bothered that he died. I think, given the finale’s premise, that it made sense for Wes to die. The moment of death was a betrayal of the character. I don’t think I’ve ever felt like the end was a betrayal to an entire show.

I think I’ll just try to forget that final episode.

I had several comments about my last post. They were largely along a similar line. It’s a line I’ve heard before. Essentially, people are bothered by what they see as an anti-feminist message where women are portrayed as blank slates that can, or perhaps need to be, programmed to do various kinds of dangerous or skeevy things. This is precisely what I was talking about when I said that I see Joss Whedon doing things here that other people don’t seem to be seeing. I would say Dollhouse is every bit as subversive of those notions as Buffy was subversive of the notion of the helpless blonde cheerleader who either falls victim to the scary forces in the world or who needs a man to save her. Every bit as subversive. It’s not as over the top. It’s far more subtle. It should be. Thanks to Joss Whedon and a lot of other folks, the TV viewing audience (or at least the right segments of it) are a lot more sophisticated than it was a dozen years ago. The thing about Dollhouse–the problem with Dollhouse from a marketing perspective–is that it doesn’t give away its secrets in the first episode or two. We’re used to getting the hook for a show early and then seeing how it builds over time. I think it’ll take a full season to even get the hook for this thing, though I’m feeling out more and more bits of it over time. What you may have seen as the gimmick behind this show as revealed in the first episode or two isn’t the gimmick behind this show.

If you’ve only seen an episode or two of this show, decided that you knew what it was about, and then quit watching on the grounds listed above, you should reconsider. This is a darker show than what he’s done before. That’s for sure. Whedon himself has said that the premise makes him uncomfortable and, therefore, he’s not surprised when it makes other people uncomfortable.

After the first episode of Dollhouse, I wondered whether I was a moron or just too big of a Joss Whedon fan. The show was so roundly panned by most people I know that I doubted whether the wonderful potential complexity that I saw was really there. People whose opinions I respect on TV shows, on movies, on fiction generally were not very high. Since the days after the first episode, I have largely avoided reading anything anyone I know was saying about the show. I figured I would watch it for however long Fox was willing to keep it on the air and be sad and outraged when they eventually cancel it–probably just as it’s really hitting its stride.

I have been more and more impressed with the show each week. When I have read stuff in the media about the show, it has still mostly been not that positive. A lot of the specific story and plot objections have seemed completely unfounded to me, though. It really seemed to me that they didn’t understand what Whedon is doing with the show. Again, I was starting to wonder whether I was a moron or too much of a fan boy. If the media people (who generally appreciate Whedon’s style) weren’t big on the show, weren’t seeing the layers that I see, then maybe they aren’t there. Maybe the fan boy thing was clouding my judgment. Maybe I looked at the lengthy period of brainstorming and development between Whedon and Dushku prior to actual production as an indicator of quality that wasn’t there.

I feel pretty vindicated after last night.

This is the kind of shit that makes people think that liberals are idiots and people out here are the kings of the idiots. I get the reasons why the policy are in place, but you’ve got to wonder if the people who implement policies like this ever stop to think about whether the totality of consequences from implementing them might do more to harm their goals than help in the long run.

Today is the last day for Denver’s Rocky Mountain News. The paper won four Pulitzers in the last eight years. The paper would have celebrated its 150th anniversary in April. It was the oldest continually run business in the state. This is its own self obituary. Who knows how long that’ll remain online, though.

I expect I’ll make a bunch of posts like this in the next year or two. The owners of 33 different daily papers have gone into Chapter 11 since December. This is a big deal, people. Daily newspapers have been the only real brake on corruption in huge chunks of this country for much of its existence. A good newspaper is beating heart of its local community. It’s true that the same economics that are closing newspapers right now have forced a decline in their quality over the last decade. Newspapers are not what they once were, but they’re still important.

Denver still has The Post. The two papers have been running under a joint operating agreement for a while. Many of the cities that will lose their newspapers in the next year or two won’t have another daily. We may soon see major cities without a daily newspaper. That is sad and frightening.

I probably shouldn’t allow myself to watch any national TV news in the morning. It makes me cranky. We usually watch a local channel. That channel has genuine, if sometimes odd personalities instead of the usual plastic news people. They’re so unlike typical large city local news that we’ve taken to calling the broadcast “the island of misfit news”. I woke up this morning, made my coffee, etc then turned on the TV. It was still on MSNBC after last night’s post speech coverage. I watched Monica Novatny play a clip where Obama pledges to cut the deficit in half during his first term. She and an analyst then proceed to do an SNL style “Really?!” segment where they rant about how he can’t possibly cut the debt in half.

The federal debt and the federal deficit are not the same thing. How does someone without a basic understanding of our decades long political debate make it as a news anchor?

On the topic of the speech itself, I don’t have much to say. It was an okay speech. The novelty of having a president who is well spoken and knows what he’s talking about hasn’t worn off yet, but I’m sure it will. The news of the night should be that Bobby Jindal all but killed any chance he had of being president in 2012 last night. His speech sounded like he was reading a children’s story to a room full of kindergartners. Beyond the incredibly poor delivery, though, it was the same generic speech that every Republican has given for twenty years. Please let them continue to be just that politically tone deaf for the next four years. We just might increase our majorities in 2010 and 2012 enough to undo some of the damage that’s been done to this country since 1981.

I read a good, if too short, article in the Monitor today that looks at some of California’s serious structural governance problems. I think they mention what I think are the biggest ones. It’s heartening to see that there’s a movement afoot to fix some of this stuff.

In my couple of years here, I’ve come to wonder whether this state is structurally broken to the point of needing to scrap its constitution and start over. I had actively started looking at California’s dreadful ballot initiative system years before I moved here after reading a David Broder book that looked at ballot initiatives generally, but that gave a lot of focus to California because of how prominent they are here. I want to like the ballot initiative system here because it seems so democratic on its face. In practice, though, it is almost always the side that raises the most money that wins regardless of how voters feel about the issue weeks or months before the election. I warned a bunch of people about this in relation to Prop 8 last year. Prop 8 was an almost perfect example of the problem. In the months before the election, polls indicated an electorally solid lead in favor of allowing gay couples to keep the rights they had. But after a massive influx of money for the Prop 8 supporters, much of it from people who do not live in this state, they were able to flood the airwaves with scare ads and turn the tables. Even though the emotions over the issue and the stakes being played for were much higher than normal, this was a text book example of how ballot initiatives work in this state.

Year in and year out, for decades, the voters of this state have said to its government “you can only tax X so much” and “you have to spend Y on Z every year” or sometimes just said “you have to X” with no provision for how it will be paid for. Each time the people add these new tax restrictions and spending mandates, they seems to do so with no regard for what they have mandated in years past. Most ballot initiatives don’t stick with people the way Prop 8 did and will. These conflicting priorities have left a state that is nearly ungovernable in good times. With the kind of economic crisis we’re facing now, even the horrible budget compromise that was just passed is going to have to go before the voters. In order to solve the 48 billion dollar shortfall, California has to borrow money from sources that have been mandated by ballot initiative for other purposes. All of this is exacerbated by the terrible, reactionary term limits stuff that California helped to pioneer. The people we elect simply don’t have the experience to tackle the problems we’re facing. They don’t spend enough time in the legislature to build the relationships with the other side that are necessary to effective compromise.

It will be interesting to see how long it takes California to recover from the current crisis. I hope we’re able to stay here to see it happen. I honestly don’t know how anyone who isn’t a venture funded high tech startup ever manages to start a small business in this state. My wife and I have tossed around ideas for a handful of different business ideas we’d be interested in picking from and starting someday. Every time we talk seriously about it, we look at the barriers that California puts up to actually hiring anyone else and always end up saying “we’d have to move back to some place cheap” to do it. I haven’t become one of those deregulation freaks. I think regulation, in the long run, is better for business itself and better for the society as a whole. California does a bunch of stuff the wrong way, though. First and foremost is the lack of rationality in the system. Too many regulations appear to overlap and contradict each other. Some regulations keep people from starting businesses all together. The mix between where regulations and taxes go after big business vs. where they go after small ones is way off.

I don’t like the budget deal that the legislature struck. I realize, however, under the current system that California has, it was the best and perhaps only option. I’m a little annoyed with the groups that are protesting the governor’s signing of this thing. I’m annoyed because it shows how fucking ignorant even the leaders of some community groups are about how the system works. If you don’t like this budget, don’t waste your energy protesting the governor’s signature. Put your energy into changing the process that requires the senate to approve budgets by a 2/3rds majority. That’s the reason that a small minority of zombie Grover Norquist Republicans can hold the whole state hostage.