We have to get the message to President Obama, the entire executive branch, and all the Democratic office holders, their staffs, and their volunteers.

Every program you want to promote has to be explained to the voters relentlessly.  You have to explain what you want to do and why it is the best thing to do.

The opposition is taking pot shots at your efforts every moment of the day.  President Obama once said that while the Republicans were politicking he was governing.  That is a very mistaken notion.  An essential part of governing is getting the people on board and supportive of what you are trying to do.  You must explain every chance you get.  Then you have to make chances to explain to make up for the people trying to keep you quiet.

Every time someone says that you are doing the wrong thing, you must explain why what you are doing is the right thing.  You do not have to say a word about the person doing the detracting.  Just stick to the positive message about why what you are doing is the right thing.

You do not have to say nasty things about the opposition.  To do so is counterproductive. If the opposition has a crazy idea, it is counterproductive to call it out as a crazy idea.  Just explain again why the right idea is the one that will work.  If the opposition’s idea is obviously crazy, then let its craziness work against it.  Your explanation of why your way is the workable way will expose the opposite idea as the one that will fail to work.

When I was managing the development of software, I tried very hard to make sure all the features we created were well documented for our users.  I used to tell everyone in the group, if you create a feature and don’t document it, it’s as if you never created the feature.  There  shouldn’t be any pride in an accomplishment of a new feature  if the customer is not aware and thus not able to use that feature.

In politics the parallel is that any initiative you work on and even get enacted is useless if you don’t have a lot of support among the voters.  The only way to get that support is to explain and then explain again.  Remember, your explanation has a very short lifetime, becuase the opposition is working to undercut you.

Explain, and explain again, until you run out of words.  Then take a deep breath and explain some more.  Until the public is able to make the explanation themselves while they are sleeping, you have not explained enough.

Another good thing comes out of the explain, explain, explain mentality.  If you do explain, but fail to convince, then you don’t understand what you are trying to do well enough to communicate it.  You need to keep refining what you are trying to do and the message that explains it until most people get it.

As a manager of software development, it was a fair amount of work to get everyone on the documentation band wagon.  The next step was to get the team doing what I really promoted (and practiced).  Write the documentation first. If the eventual user doesn’t really understand what they are going to get, how are they going to tell you if it is what they really want?  Any number of times, I have made significant changes and improvements to what I was planning to do because of what I learned from trying to explain it to prospective customers.

Can it be that Republicans can only attribute to others the evil motives that the Republicans have themselves? In psychiatry, I think they call that projection.

From Dr. Sanity:

Projection – attributing one’s own unacknowledged feelings to others; includes severe prejudice, severe jealousy, hypervigilance to external danger, and “injustice collecting”. (EXAMPLE, EXAMPLE, EXAMPLE, EXAMPLE, EXAMPLE , EXAMPLE (remember that projection is a primitive form of paranoia, so it is common in today’s world)

See the clip on Comedy Central

In his column Fast Track to Inequality in The New York Times, Bob Herbert explains it all.

The clearest explanation yet of the forces that converged over the past three decades or so to undermine the economic well-being of ordinary Americans is contained in the new book, “Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer — and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class.”

The authors, political scientists Jacob Hacker of Yale and Paul Pierson of the University of California, Berkeley, argue persuasively that the economic struggles of the middle and working classes in the U.S. since the late-1970s were not primarily the result of globalization and technological changes but rather a long series of policy changes in government that overwhelmingly favored the very rich.

Later in the column he states:

This occurred at the same time that organized labor, the most effective force fighting on behalf of the middle class and other working Americans, was caught in a devastating spiral of decline.

As if this decline wasn’t also part of the concerted effort of

over the past three decades in which big business mobilized on an enormous scale to become much more active in Washington

As part of my confirmation bias, I would like to believe that globalization, technological innovation, and free trade are not the cause of our problem. That means that I will have to read the book so that I can be armed with facts to prove that what I have always believed is correct.

Before reading this column I had already argued against Thom Hartmann’s, Book Review Exclusively for Truthout/BuzzFlash: “Free Trade Doesn’t Work: What Should Replace It and Why”

The review says that there are European nations that handle the situation better than we do. Germany and the Scandinavian countries have trade surpluses. The rest of Europe is near balance.

Then the review goes on to say that protectionism is a legitimate choice.

No evidence is presented as to how protectionism is legitimate. The review makes no connection between the successful exporters or nearly balanced countries and the use of protectionism.

Unless you explain otherwise, those countries seem to be doing quite well under the free-trade regime you say is killing us.

If there were a good case to be made for protectionism, then I suspect there would have been a hint as to why it is good in the review. None having been made, I am not enticed to read the book.

The New York Times article Bomb Plot Shows Key Role Played by Intelligence has some useful information about this unfolding case.

However, I don’t know if the following would fit that classification.

In discussing why most security efforts have been spent on protecting passenger flights rather than cargo flights, the article says the following:

For the most part, governments around the world had bet that it was less likely that the cargo system would be the target of attacks, given that its flights carry few passengers.

Whether or not the experts are right about the bomb being meant to explode while the plane was in flight, it still could have been timed to kill large numbers of people on the ground.  So carrying few passengers is hardly of concern to a terrorist.

Maybe the headline should have read “Bomb Plot Shows Key Role Played By The Lack Of Intelligence”.  You don’t have to even make a bet that your enemy will focus his or her efforts on the weakest part of your defense.  It’s a sure thing that if terrorists discover through reading the newspapers that you are not focusing your security efforts on cargo transportation, then that is where they will strike next.

We all read in our history books about France’s Maginot Line to protect themselves from an attack by Germany.  In World War II, the German attack merely bypassed the Maginot Line.  [I must admit that if you read and believe the WikiPedia link above about the Maginot Line, perhaps what we think we know for sure ain’t really so, to paraphrase Mark Twain.]

LlandaR encouraged me to post this clip of Jon Stewart’s Moment of Sincerity from the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear.

Comefy Central has a number of other video clips from the rally.

In The New York Times article With Victory, Republicans Would Face Uncertainty, John Harwood goes over some of the obvious problems facing the government after the election.

He concludes with the following:

What’s clear, after Republican defeats in 2006 and 2008 and Democrats’ travails this year, is that both parties remain at risk so long as Americans suffer from high unemployment and weak economic growth. As the political world begins looking ahead to the 2012 elections, that means the widest opening for an independent candidacy since Ross Perot’s 1992 campaign.

“I think it’s possible,” Jeb Bush said. Meantime, he added, just as Mr. Obama has hit “the reset button” on foreign policy endeavors, “We should maybe try to reset the political climate in Washington.”

If Obama’s problem is that he has not been able to get the 60% cooperation of the Senate, how is an independent President going to do better?

If the problem is the Senate, then the solution is not to change the President or the President’s party.  The solution, one would think, would be to change the Senate.

Of course nothing that the American electorate might choose to do would surprise me any more.  They might in fact change the characteristics of the Presidents they elect in the future without paying any attention to the real problem which seems to lie in the Senate.

The old Sesame Street routine seems to have more and more relevance these days.  Who knew it was meant as a parody of the American electorate as a whole? The routine went something like this:

Customer: I’ll have orange juice and eggs for breakfast.

Waiter: We don’t have orange juice.

C: Then I’ll have cereal and orange juice.

W: We don’t have orange juice.

C: Then I’ll have pancakes and orange juice.

W: We don’t have orange juice.

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I found Michael Hiltzik’s article Why big-time CEOs make terrible politicians in the Los Angeles Times.

The quote above the article sums it up very well as follows:

Government and business are antithetical. That’s not a flaw in the system — government exists to take on precisely those tasks the private sector can’t or won’t.

The article goes on to explain in more depth why the title is appropriate.

I had to show you this letter to the editor, How’s this for a bird-brained study?, from the Worcester T & G.

Note the date is October 31, 2010. It is not April 1, 2010. This must be why they invented the acronym ROTFL, which Murray must have done when he saw his letter chosen as the letter of the week.

I don’t know of any seersucker birds, especially not single and double breasted ones. But I think the people who chose this as the letter of the week were almost certainly the suckers.

According to OMG Facts

Dr. Suess coined the word “nerd.”

The term originated in the 1950 book “If I Ran the Zoo”. From the book:

“And then, just to show them, I’ll sail to Ka-Troo. And Bring Back an IT-KUTCH, a PREEP and a PROO, a NERKLE, a NERD, and a SEERSUCKER, too!”