Kathleen Hall Jamieson on Campaign Misinformation | Moyers & Company | BillMoyers.com

KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: There’s the notion that discourse can either ennoble you and increase your capacity for reflection and judgment or it can demean you and constrict your ability to make good judgments and make thoughtful judgments. And across the years we’ve increasingly moved to a kind of campaign structure that makes it harder to thoughtfully consider alternatives, to give the candidates the space to lay out alternatives thoughtfully.

And increasingly we’ve rewarded candidates who have deceived and taken words out of context and campaigned in ways that made it impossible for them to govern well. We’ve got to try to find a way to fix this. We’re at a very, very critical time right now.

Politics is badly broken …

Kathleen Hall Jamieson on Campaign Misinformation | Moyers & Company | BillMoyers.com

I keep pulling out quotes. Go see the video and/or read the transcript.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson on Campaign Misinformation | Moyers & Company | BillMoyers.com

BILL MOYERS: What does it say about democracy when you do get locked into a mindset that, that responds in no positive way to the facts and to reality?

KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: … My sense of many past elections was that the party eventually nominated a person who paid a role in telling the party what it was. They helped frame the platform, they then run on the platform.

In this case I think the candidates are trying to align themselves to — on the Republican side — the conservative base instead of telling Republicans where the party should be they’re trying to tell people that they are conservative where the conservatives are. And I think that’s what Romney is saying with his strange statement that he’s severely conservative as Governor.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson on Campaign Misinformation | Moyers & Company | BillMoyers.com

Kathleen Hall Jamieson on Campaign Misinformation | Moyers & Company | BillMoyers.com

KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: That’s true. And here’s the reason that we should try to make them accurate before they, before they go on the air. They, right now there’s one small place in the environment that individuals can actually act and potentially make a difference. Local broadcast stations have the right to refuse third party ads. They only have to accept ads by bona fide candidates for federal office, that would be presidential candidates among others.

BILL MOYERS: They don’t have to take ads from super PACs?

KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: From super PACs, that’s correct. And if they take them they have an absolute right to say, "You prove every statement in that ad before I’m going to put it on my airwaves and let into my community’s living rooms."

BILL MOYERS: But Kathleen, you know that those station managers reap a windfall out there from a presidential– from an election year like this. They’re not going to turn down these ads.

KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: I grant you that. The financial incentive is just too strong, but there is win-win. They can insist on the accuracy of what they air.

What Flackcheck.org is doing is taking the fact checking content from the major fact checkers and posting it against the ads they’re airing in the various primaries right now. So a station manager can go and look at our website and see for example, here are the ads that are airing right now and here are the deceptions in the ads. They can now go back to the super PACs and say, "Correct those or I’m not going to let you continue to air." You can fix these ads to make them accurate, station manager.

BILL MOYERS: The station manager can?

KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: The station manager can, and has an absolute right under existing regulation. And so what we would like is every citizen in every media market to contact by email and by phone, and we’re going to be posting a way to do this on our website. Contact the station managers, contact the stations to say, "We want you to insist on the accuracy of the third party ads you air not just for the presidency, but across the board.

And then when it comes into our living rooms, we will know that you protected us from that form of air pollution. It’s a little things that citizens can do and station managers, but I think those station managers care about their communities, they live in the communities there after all. And I think they’d like to perform this public service.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson on Campaign Misinformation | Moyers & Company | BillMoyers.com

Kathleen Hall Jamieson on Campaign Misinformation | Moyers & Company | BillMoyers.com

you now are existing in a world in which language is decoupled from anything that is reasonably a referent.

And as a result you not only are not describing what is out there, but you’re exhausting the capacity of the language to express outrage. — KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON

Kathleen Hall Jamieson on Campaign Misinformation | Moyers & Company | BillMoyers.com

Kathleen Hall Jamieson on Campaign Misinformation | Moyers & Company | BillMoyers.com

GROVER NORQUIST: We are not auditioning for fearless leader. We don’t need a President to tell us what direction to go […] We just need a president to sign this stuff. We don’t need someone to think it up or design it. We have a house and a senate. The leadership now for the modern conservative movement for the next 20 years will be coming out of the House and the Senate so focus on electing the most conservative Republican who can win in each House seat, and the most conservative Republican who can win in each Senate seat. And then pick a Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen to become President of the United States.

BILL MOYERS: Now, what Grover Norquist is saying is that it doesn’t really matter who the president is. We, the conservatives, the party, being elected in all of these House and Senate races will tell the President what to do and all he needs to do is to sign the legislation we pass. Is it conceivable to you that they don’t want anyone with a vision or capable of leadership, they just a want a figurehead?

Kathleen Hall Jamieson on Campaign Misinformation | Moyers & Company | BillMoyers.com

Gawd, I hate that man with every fiber of my being. I deeply resent that he has been fucking up the country for decades. He should be shunned. Instead, he’s the man barely concealed behind the curtain. Why does anyone listen to a god-damn thing he says.

“Conservatives” (hardly) are relentless.

www.birddigiscoper.com: Wisconsin takes another step backwards

At 12:01am this morning the Republican controlled state Senate passed an anti-wetlands bill that ought to be ethically reprehensible to every birder and nature advocate in Wisconsin. More than window and tower collisions, feral cat predation, chemical spills, illegal hunting, poisoning, and most everything else, the primary reason for the decline of bird populations is habitat loss. For a lover of birds, this will be a tremendously damaging piece of legislation.

Sadly, this bill will dramatically weaken restrictions for developing on wetlands. So as the right-wing mantra goes, we are open for business and [BLEEP] all else. How short-sighted some of us are by failing to fully consider that our long-term survivability ultimately depends on the health of the earth, its habitat, and fragile ecosystems.

Apart from the intrinsic value our wetlands provide to birds and other wildlife, a recent study found that Wisconsin’s wetlands are worth billions in services and benefits each year. However, I’m aware of at least one right-wing nature photographer who prefers to embrace ignorance, ambiguity, and inaction rather than accept science and facts and figures, so take the report with a healthy skeptical attitude.

Most prevalent in today’s media, conservatives are quick to criticize and denounce government as the underlying problem with just about everything, but there’s a reason why Wisconsin has such wonderful natural treasures rich in biodiversity; it’s because they’ve traditionally been protected by our state government. I was painfully aware that once conservatives gained control of our political processes that they would eventually go after the environment; it’s endemic to their nature to ignore the needs of Nature.

© 2012 Mike McDowell

www.birddigiscoper.com: Wisconsin takes another step backwards