Grand Plans In Tennessee

Honest to god, why do people fall for this crap?  And why would they want it in the first place?

In today’s New York Times a story tells of a grand plan to make Spring Hill, Tennessee, an economic and entertainment destination (“In Tennessee, Grand Plans for a $750 Million Theme Park Raise Great Doubt). 

It appears to be nothing more than a wannabe scam.

But why do people fall for this?  Why would people want this??  Cut up 1500 acres of open space for acres of pavement, hotels, and a theme park?  Think of the development that would follow a venture like this.  Bigger, more congested roads and highways; strip malls and fast food joints; and a service industry to support it.  For an example, look at central Florida surrounding Disney World.  Soon the only orange juice you can buy will be at McDonald’s.

Of course this nightmare of land misuse would only occur if the plan succeeded.  Many of these schemes don’t add up, and sadly that isn’t discovered until the damage has already been done. 

I smugly say misuse of land resources because it is both telling and unnerving that the mayor of Spring Hill would start to promote this plan without knowing much about the people proposing it. 

It appears that the developers haven’t the experience or resources to do much.  Which probably is a good thing because if the local government does so little checking and planning before any real plans are drawn, do you expect them to be smart planners down the road?

Sadly it seems that we learn by bad examples.  Our cities and landscapes everywhere are littered with poor development choices.  It is suburban sprawl, but it also can be misguided industrial and commercial development incentives plunked down in the middle of nowhere in the name of economic growth. 

Minnesota’s former governor, Tim Pawlenty, had his failed JOBZ, for example, but he was not alone among political leaders for proposing government sponsored waste and mismanagement.  Tax incentive “enterprise zones” are common examples of bad planning that plague the country.  (Some of these incentives DO make a lot of sense, however; they tend be in urban areas where infrastructure and people exist to fill an economic void.  Many cities, large and small, have used this tool effectively.)

We have a responsibility to use our most valuable resources — our natural resources, such as land — more responsibly.  Economic, blindly pursued, is not inherently the best choice for our resources.  Cheaper is not always better.  Moreover, sacrificing a resource because it does not optimize a profit can be very short-sighted, indeed.  We seem to be slipping back to a frontier mentality when it comes to land resources in this country.

Here in Minnesota there is a push to build a new bridge across the St. Croix River connecting the Minneapolis/St. Paul Metropolitan Area more conveniently with west central Wisconsin.  Many people in Minnesota are pushing for the idea, including many politicians concerned about Minnesota’s economic health.  It isn’t yet clear to me how a bridge encouraging growth in west central Wisconsin will economically benefit Minnesota, but what do I know?  (I’m still waiting for someone to tell me.)

Economics is one issue and it is closely tied to another, our environment. 

Former Vice President Walter Mondale, who as a senator in 1968 co-authored a bill to protect America’s rive

Late Summer High Water. Stillwater Lift Bridge. St. Croix River.

rs, correctly argues that the bridge circumvents the environmental law.  The law is in place, in part, to protect the river from economic interests.  The private market has no incentive to protect the river when it becomes more profitable to pursue economic interests that outweigh the economic opportunities possible from protecting the river. 

We choose to create these laws because we recognize that our natural resources are shared resources which will outlast any of us.  These resources are our true legacy for future generations.  We need to be stewards of them, not destroyers. 

On the one hand I am confused by people who don’t share my aesthetic and values when it comes to land, land use, and planning.  I suppose that’s a matter of values and experience.  But then I don’t understand how people can be so gullible to fall into a boondoggle without any apparent forethought or fact-checking whatsoever.  I believe if we were smarter and more cautious, regardless of your values, the better off we would all be in the end.

Field Near Big Marine Lake.

Conservative Values One Penny at a Time

Great Seal of the State of Minnesota

In Minnesota the GOP is trying to impose its conservative values on the state by hiding behind the screen of the budget crisis, a budget crisis that their deliberate underfunding of government helped cause.  Rather than confront the state’s budget situation straight on and responsibly, they take it as an opportunity to reduce government further, dismantle public services and public goods, and give more to the free-market. 

This is not going to help in either the short term or the long term.  But that is of no concern to the GOP.  They want to help themselves and private profits before they serve the interests of the state.  Prove otherwise.

In the first place, Republicans simply must not understand what a public good is.  Most importantly they don’t understand the economics behind them, why they exist and the important positive impact of public goods. 

(Joseph Stiglitz has a good essay about education and knowledge as a crucially valuable public good.  Sadly the GOP is not contributing much here, either.  But I digress.)

Take a look at two GOP ideas to help solve Minnesota’s budget problem.  In one they propose charging prisoners a $5 co-pay for medical visits.  In another they propose logging black walnut trees in two of Minnesota’s state parks.  

What is wrong with stuff like this?  It depends on your point of view if there is anything wrong at all.  You might not like prisoners and want to charge them for doctor visits.  You might care more about profits than parks. 

That’s all fine…maybe…but I think we should all be able to agree that proposals which will generate a million here and a million there really are not serious efforts at restructuring a systemic multi-billion dollar budget problem.  The people proposing these “solutions” have other goals in mind.

Republicans hypocritically whine about earmarks, but this is in essence a pork barrel of another sort.  In the case of the prison medical co-pay, it is a way to make a tough disciplinary stand on criminals.  It is like stealing candy from a baby — which I wouldn’t quite presume your local GOP representative does, by the way, at least not since he or she has grown up — but who is going to come to the defense of prisoners?  For the most part, no one.  It is like shooting fish in a barrel…a pork barrel.  Thus potentially an easy political “victory.” 

And…oh yeah…that budget.  They did something net positive for the budget, about a penny’s worth.

And the trees…here is a true political earmark.  What do the Republicans screech about incessantly?  The sneaky tricks played on them and the American people when irrelevant legislation is snuck into larger bills, right?  While this isn’t necessarily being snuck into the budget proposal, it has the same result.

The money made from trees that would otherwise “rot” and be wasted will amount to a drop in the overall budget bucket.  In essence it is irrelevant.  Our state funding problems are much broader and systematic than anything that sacrificing some park trees can help solve (or privatizing some state forestry resources, another short-term, short-sighted solution proposed by the GOP here). 

What they really have to gain, under the cover of a budget crisis, is a chance to take profits from public resources.  Haven’t we had enough of this?

America’s public resources are a sense of pride for many of us.  Patriotic Americans supported our shared public investments.  Minnesota often lead the way with some of the best public resources in the nation.  Now?  Now we are chiseling away at it all in the phony interest of resolving a budget mess. 

What matters first is ideology.  You can see this at the national level with attempts to cut funding the public broadcasting at NPR and PBS.  Those are not cuts that will make a difference.  Funding programs like that are not causing the problem.  In the United States we have a funding problem first, then look at the spending problem.  (Unnecessary wars?  Unsustainable tax cuts?)

Where conservatives failed to divide us on social issues, they are succeeding on economic ones.  By creating an economic crisis, they have the opportunity to “earmark” their social agenda into public legislation.  It is more than the privatization of public services and resources (cf., Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine.), it is at a level of personal conservative values that include religion, sexuality, gender and race. 

Conservatives don’t want less government.  They want more of it.  They want more that reflects their personal values, not good public policy and investment.  It is high time we call them out on it.  In Minnesota people like Representative Kurt Zellers and senators Koch and Michele talk a lot, but they don’t answer questions.  They preach and squirm.  And we let them get away with it. 

Ask a very simple question:  How, exactly, will they close a $6 billion dollar budget gap with cuts alone.  (Still waiting for an answer.)  How can they — a party that pretends to support families and the middle class — support an unbalanced tax system that benefits the wealthiest with lower real tax rates?

Ask questions.  Demand answers.  Above all else, don’t let Republicans earmark their morality, which should be private and personal, into legislation that should serve the common good. 

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• Minnesota: Michele Bachmann’s Loony State (thedailybeast.com)
• Tiny Tim’s First Little Step (alittletourinyellow.wordpress.com)
• Prioities and Values (alittletourinyellow.wordpress.com)

Tiny Tim’s First Little Step

Tim Pawlenty

Anyone with any grasp of facts and figures really should hold on tight before watching Tim Pawlenty‘s video announcing his formation of a presidential exploratory committee. 

If Tim is sincere, he simply does not get it. 

But no one so directly involved with politics can be sincere about such things and thus so naive…or can they be?

Tim’s generation of conservatives are hypocritical and ungrateful to the core.  Conservatives today propose cuts to services that benefit aging Americans, for example, the harder working, forward-thinking Americans who built a robust economy and enacted policies that gave people like Pawlenty a good education and a lift up in this country.  Can you respect that sort of political ethic?

Look at Pawlenty’s little YouTube jeremiad.  It turns facts upside down and asks us to disregard the truth about where our country is today and how it got there. 

He laces his alter-reality with images of the ruin that conservative principles have brought to this country.   Never mind that Tim is a conservative Republican, one who advocates the very policies and values that have dismantled the social and economic security of our country.   He points out the damage, blames it on other people, and asks for the chance to do it all over again.

Only the desperate-to-be-deceived still think conservatives and Wall Street are blameless in the debacle that nearly ruined our national economy two short years ago.   Only blind conservative ideologues think a country with a dying middle class offers more for our security and freedom. 

Selfishness — a misguided turn against noble selflessness and public service – is at the root of conservativism, and sadly that turn is taking a sharper and deeper cynical tone.  There simply is a pig-headed ignorance about facts that conservatives embrace too easily, and among the biggest pig heads of them all is Tim Pawlenty.

Speaking of pigs…Tim mentions the demise of the meat packing industry in South St. Paul, his former home town and a city that he disses by telling the world that the city has lost its spirit and soul.  Good PR there, Tim.  But maybe Tim isn’t so clear about where he comes from anyway. 

Unless Tim is trying to reclaim his blue collar roots, he’s Tim From Eagan.  Eagan is a more prosperous and — I suppose we can presume — still a city with spirit and soul. 

Tim tells us that he has travelled to nearly every state in the union, too.  (He neglects to tell us that he did much of this travelling while elected as Minnesota‘s governor, but no bother…it is all over now.)  So who’s to say what place Tim recalls when he remembers his youth today?  One of the dying businesses shown in his video as he’s talking about his former hometown has a palm tree growing in the background.

I grew up in South St. Paul, sadly a little too close to Tim and his era.  I don’t know what spirit and soul our city lost.  The meat packing plants started closing in the 70s as the industry decentralized and moved out of our cities and into rural America.  (The plants that remained closed while Pawlenty was governor, by the way.  Where was his cool and hip-sounding JOBZ when we needed it?) 

People struggled, no doubt, but they hung on and we had a pretty good life in South St. Paul.  Great schools, great neighborhoods, and plenty of opportunity.  The decades of our youth were not all that  bad.  Unlike Tim, I choose to respect that, and like many others who have left South St. Paul, I don’t only go back only if it is politically prudent to do so.

In so many ways Tim Pawlenty shows what is wrong with conservatives today.  He has no respect for his roots, whether working class or middle class; he doesn’t understand how the power of community and progressive government helped him.  He is ignorant of civic values.  He lacks creativity…

In short, Tim Pawlenty is the perfect Republican.

Tim’s video is loaded with the same tired partisan rhetoric.  Anti-government this, pro-Reagan that…blah, blah, blah, blah, blah…there is nothing there.  No new ideas, no fresh solutions.  But then why would we expect anything more than rhetorical soundbites?  Tim is running for a Republican nomination, after all, and he is doing so for today’s hyper-conservative Republican Party.

Take a startling example.  Tim makes the claim that anti-government principles will create jobs and opportunity.  He says “In the last eight years, that’s just what I did here in Minnesota.” 

Well, ok, Tim…run on that.  Run on your last 8 years.  I’m looking around and paying attention.  There do not seem to be a lot of jobs and opportunity rising from the wreckage you left behind.  In fact, you did more to suck the spirit and soul out of our state than you did to build working solutions.  I’m sorry, but I don’t see much here to brag about. 

Bragging about ruining government shouldn’t be the foundation of a presidential campaign anyway, should it?

Governments invest public interest and efforts into public goods.  It is that simple.  Rich and poor alike benefit from a well-functioning society and the advantages that strong public goods provide.  There is no time — and little point, I’m afraid — in lecturing about the merits and purpose of public goods, but when a beneficial service or facility (e.g., clean air and working highways) cannot be turned profitable, the private sector has no interest in providing those services and facilities.  We choose, therefore, to provide those valuable assets to us all as a whole through our collective public investment.  Conservatives don’t get it.  They don’t want to get it.  They want someone else to pay for everything.  They want only what’s theirs. 

As much as Tim tries to portray himself as a straight shooter, he’s much like most hypocritical conservatives.  He has had it both ways.

Oh, by the way.  That reminds me…I watched Tim’s video on the StarTribune website.  Some fun irony here.  Homophobe Tim’s video follows an advertisement for the Twin Cities Gay Men’s Chorus Spring concert!  Perhaps a little justice exists out there…but not enough.

In the end, we have to stop electing these myopic little people to office.  We need Can Do people, people who respect all Americans and the government that serves them.  In the last 30 years we have gone too far in the wrong direction and electing people like Tim Pawlenty will not change that course.

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Minnesota’s Brilliant Zellers…

Duh.

Minnesota’s speaker of the house Kurt Zellers was on MRP with lumpy dumpy state senate majority leader Amy Koch and tried to answer a few question.  Their effort was futile.  Listen for yourself.  This is what happens when you elect people hardly qualified for the PTA social committee to important office.  They mouth soundbites.  No answers to questions.

But most telling was bowl-cut Zellers response to a question about sacrifice.  A caller asked if it were fair for people to turn off their heat to make ends meet when wealthier Minnesotans were paying a smaller percentage of their income in taxes versus the middle class.

Zellers let us know that we all sacrifice.  He said he worked in the public relations industry and his answer makes you wonder…really?  He said he was fired (that makes sense) and he and his wife had to make hard decisions.  He said…no lie, listen for yourself…that they had to talk about club memberships and a trip to Hawaii and see if those were in the budget.

Not only does this scream stupid, it misses the point entirely. 

Sacrifice is relative.  I’ll give that to Kurt.  If you want to be an asshole there is nothing preventing that.  If you’re stupid…well, you’re stupid.  But is it better to be wealthy in the United States or to be wealthy in a place like Somalia? 

There’s a reason why the lucky from third world countries come to the United States.  We have — or at least had — a better standard of living.  We had an educated, healthy, and progressive population that took advantage of economic opportunities, for example.  People like Zellers could count on people to provide services like health care, design functioning bridges, and give good hair cuts…something Kurt clearly cares nothing about, but the rest of us do. 

Now we are dumbing ourselves down and poor little Kurtiebert is sharing the pain because he’s sparing Hawaii the eyesore of his pale ass on the beach?  Really?  That is supposed to make us feel better? 

Zellers was fired from PR for a reason.  He’s an idiot.  But that should not surprise us.  He’s a Republican.  And Republicans are idiots.  Tautologies ring true.

Because I live in Minnesota…

Give Way Sign in Australia

…I don’t like traffic roundabouts. 

To use a roundabout safely, drivers need to know how to yield.  In Minnesota drivers do not know how to yield.  I’m not sure they know what yield means. 

Minnesota drivers don’t understand stop signs either.  In my neighborhood everyone ignores stop signs — police, school buses, little old nuns — no one stops at stop signs.  So expect them to know how to yield?  Fat chance.

I drive many thousands of miles a year all over the city and state and I believe Minnesotans absolutely must rank near the very bottom on a driving ability scale.  I don’t know…I’ve heard the drivers in Costa Rica are fairly weak, but I would have to see it for myself.

As a kid the grown ups would brag about their great driving skills.  It would even come up as a side  talk on news shows and radio programs, usually related to our occasional stormy weather.  No one, we were led to believe, could handle a car better than a Minnesotan, especially in the winter. 

It is all a bunch of baloney.

The state that comes in a close second, in my humble opinion, is Arizona.  I lived there for 10 years and they are about as careless and unskilled there as they are here in Minnesota…about half as careless and unskilled.  But then I figured it all out.  It makes perfect sense that Arizona drivers would be about half as bad as Minnesota drivers because half of the people living in Arizona come from Minnesota.

What don’t Minnesotans do right on the road?  Well…they don’t know how to merge, pick the wrong lanes to drive in, block traffic, tail gate, don’t signal lane changes, daydream, swerve and drive at inconsistent speeds, ignore traffic signs, run red lights, and generally drive me nuts. 

Those of you in Wisconsin — yes, you, in your beat up Pontiac Firebirds — you don’t get off the hook either.  You’re a little easier to deal with because you drive at half the speed of everyone else.  I can simply scoot around you.

Now that I have that off my chest, I can go out and drive, avoiding all known traffic roundabouts.  I wish I could avoid my fellow Minnesotans, too.

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Prioities and Values

We're working for peanuts now, kids! Never liked that well-paying job anyway.

What is wrong with Republicans?  Let’s be kind and presume they possess the intelligence required to understand facts and numbers, something that takes a very generous interpretation of intelligence, I’m afraid. 

But let’s pretend.

The real issue then is one of priorities and values.  Take Senator David Hann, a Minnesota Republican, for example.  He just wasted 3 minutes on WCCO-TV telling Esme Murphy that people have to learn to “live within their means.”  What does that mean? 

What they mean is they want everyone to live within the GOP’s unbalanced priorities and their bankrupt values.  That’s it.

You still hear from Republicans a lot of folksy talk about families gathered around the kitchen table dealing with their financial difficulties as a parallel for what government must do.  Blah, blah, blah.  Perhaps it never occurred to Republicans that the family most likely didn’t get into a financial mess because they chose to reduce their family income by voluntarily giving up a career for a part-time job at Wal-Mart.

For decades, the GOP has deliberately reduced our states’ and our nation’s “kitchen table” budget.  They have cut taxes in good times and bad, and still want to cut taxes more, but preach the inappropriate argument that government needs to learn to live within its means. 

This attack on our government has been catastrophic.  Our infrastructure is in disrepair and lags by decades behind other developing countries.  Our economy is for most people flat when it is at its best.  We are losing ground in education, energy, health care, and social equality.  (This is America?) 

As Republicans see things, it is perfectly fine to waste our future on unsustainable tax cuts that require more of the poor and less of the rich.  That’s a solid and consistent GOP value.  Makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it?  Then they go about preaching that we need to live within our means.  Classless thieves always wanting more for less, especially if someone else can pay for it, that’s today’s American conservative. 

The promised jobs that tax cuts provide have largely gone overseas, building huge profits for corporations and institutional investors, but only offering an indirect glimmer of hope to the increasingly shrinking number of Americans who have money saved in some of these investments.  Otherwise…well, our growth industries are low-paying jobs without long-term security or benefits. 

A lot more crisis meetings will be held around that kitchen table if this continues to go on. 

One has to wonder why people don’t talk politics around the kitchen table.  Politics — messy as it is — is much easier to understand than economics.  Hell, we have a pile of elected officials claiming economic expertise who can’t discern supply from demand, but that’s no bother.  It is unimportant when opinions matter more than facts. 

But in politics your opinions are invested by your best interests, perhaps in a more forgiving way compared with economics.  You would think there would be room at the kitchen table to sort this out.  You don’t even need a pencil and a pad of paper.  Just some freaking common sense!  Stop and ask yourself:  Who is voting for these right-wing clowns?  And if the answer turns back to be you, ask yourself why. 

Even the best and most successful of us would be better off with a little less GOP backwardness.  We have a future to worry about, after all.

Not everyone is suffering, that’s true.  A lot of people still live comfortable lives and find opportunities.  Some people thrive in this environment.  The problem is it comes at the cost of our overall common good.  A smart and socially stable population is good for business, for example.  It is also good for politics and all the good choices smarter, better political leaders make for our common good.  This insane and thoughtless rush to cut government fails us.  The proof is everywhere. 

I am, I suppose, growing tired of an empty, pessimistic morality that destroys the common good.  I am tired of dancing around trying to be diplomatic about people who lead by these immoral and factually backward principles.   They are ruining our country.  Why should we respect enemies of all that has been good for us?

Hold these people accountable.  How have the last 30 years, governed largely on conservative principles, made us better and stronger?  Anyone?

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Columbo and Sales

Lt. Columbo. LAPD.

If you are in sales, please go watch an episode or two of Columbo.

I decided this morning that it might be fun to model my sales calls after Columbo.  (What is Columbo’s first name, by the way?  They must use it in the show, but I haven’t a clue.  Salvatorre or something like that, I’ll bet.) 

Columbo has a knack for hanging around and getting what he wants.  He always prevails in the end and that’s what we want as sales people, right?  More importantly, he gets his adversary to shrug and say…you got me, Columbo, you are right.

Also keep in mind that Columbo is right.  Always.  No innocent has ever gone to the chair on Columbo’s watch.  The show is simple.  The good guys and bad guys are set from the beginning of each episode.  There is no mystery there.  What makes the show fascinating is Columbo’s skill in making the bad guy admit that he is the bad guy.  The “gotcha”.   Perfect agreement and buy-in every time.

In a way, that’s what sales is.  The Gotcha.  But it isn’t gotcha in a swindle kind of way…or at least it shouldn’t be…it is a gotcha in the good way, in the Columbo way. 

When I sell my advertising, I have to remind my clients that they want to generate an extra million dollars in revenue next year.  I can’t run in there slap him around like some Dirty Harry punk detective, I need to go in all out Columbo style.  You need to lay it out, step by step, for your client.  This is who you are and this is where you are going to be.  The nice thing about sales is you’re not trying to send a guy to Sing Sing, you’re trying to help him keep his business afloat!

So go watch Columbo.  I’m not going to spend a lot time here explaining why and giving you a big sales pitch.  Just do it.

(Hey…Just do it!  That’s kind of catchy.)

Bring Elmer Back!

Hey, Wabbit! Wanna buy some advertising?

For a week that started with a lot of success, it is certainly ending with a heavy thud.  Plus people seem to be reading my “Hey Elmer” post more than the other thoughtful stuff I have offered here. 

So let’s bring back Elmer!

I’ll wear my Elmer Fudd hat as I go to my two afternoon appointments.  Perhaps the magic won’t be there because I am intentionally putting on the Elmer Fudd hat, but let’s see what happens.

“Does anyone want to buy some advertising?”

Waiting…

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NPR, Public Discourse, and Common Sense

Today NPR Chief Executive Vivian Schiller resignedafter an NPR fundraising executive, Ronald Schiller, — coincidence, no relation – was caught in one of Republican “journalist” James O’Keefe’s traps…and there is a lot about this that should make people angry. 

The problem of deception and entrapment leading to conclusions of fact and intention should be obvious.  However issues surrounding the response to this entrapment, both from NPR defenders and critics, say a lot about double-standards.  It also reveals how pathetically weak any answer to conservative messaging is in this country.  The rhetorical right controls public discourse.  It is that simple. 

First, why do the opinions of one person — Ron Schiller — represent all that is NPR and what it stands for, but  the almost ubiquitous crazy right wingers and Tea Partiers we see everywhere can be dismissed as existing on the fringe and not indicative of mainstream conservative politics? 

If we applied the same standard used to judge Ron Schiller to judge American conservativism, you could argue that Ron Schiller was absolutely correct about the disparaging opinions he expressed about conservatives. 

Don’t we see racist, jingoistic, and utterly stupid signs at Tea Party rallies, for example?  Or take the self-fashioned  Tea Party Caucus leader in Washington, Michele Bachmann.  She has said plenty of outrageous things.  Should we conclude, therefore, that all GOP Congressmen and Congresswomen are equally nuts? 

We don’t draw this conclusion.  The right would never admit it and the left is too damn careful to be truly fair and balanced.  Need an example?  Listen to NPR Ombudsman Alicia Shepard being interviewed on Minnesota Public Radio Midmorning with Kerri Miller today.

Alicia Shepard falls all over herself to concede everything.  She all but throws in the towel, lamenting that the battle for public funding is all but lost now.  She vilifies Ron Schiller repeatedly, presumably trying to put distance between Schiller and NPR.  Ok, fine…the outcome of that staged trap is embarrassing and makes defending NPR more difficult, but at least try to defend NPR!

It might even pay to come to Schiller’s defense by explaining that in the course of trying to measure up a potentially major donor he went too far in trying to earn the donor’s confidence and expressed opinions that are not shared by NPR nor by its programming. 

Shepard did a horrible job re-framing the NPR message.  Running away from Schiller and throwing barbs at him as you run only seems to reinforce and magnify the negative message that the event created.  That is the wrong way to answer a crisis like this. 

But that’s more or less the liberal way.  Maybe we should capitalize it and take ownership:  The Liberal Way.  Roll over and concede.  Apologize.  Back track.  Don’t counter attack.  Maybe the attackers will get bored and go away…

Strong and positive counter attack is the responsible action.  Pushing back is not necessarily a bad thing.

I would have acknowledged Ron Schiller’s mistake, but put it into a context that lets you defend NPR and even defend the work he was trying to do.  You might change the narrative, for example; explain that raising money from private donors is a necessary and high-pressure reality, requiring many individual judgement calls, which in this case went wrong.

Sesame Street

Embrace the mistake then move on to the NPR message. 

How about:  “Without our combination of public funding and private fundraising many small NPR stations could go off the air, impacting millions of people who depend on NPR for news and information…”  And rebuild your positive NPR message.  Constructively go back on the offensive.  Yes?  No?  Why not?

Once again common sense has been hijacked by conservative rhetoric and hysteria, and the liberal left is complicit. 

Where is the talk about the value of NPR to the people of the United States?  How about PBS?  Television stands to lose even more in this race to de-fund America.  Why are we answering the critics…and agreeing with them in crisis in a misguided attempt (once again) to win their favor and compromise? 

We are watching the American way of life that made this country great and strong eviscerated before our eyes and no one is getting into the fight to defend it.  The NPR fiasco — a program that costs taxpayers about $1 per person annually — is a very public example of how pathetic our nation’s  impending losses appear to be.

The course of public discourse must change and constantly placating the angry right in debate is not going to get it done.

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Hey Elmer!

Hey, Mister! Wanna buy some advertising? You do?!

I had a great day in the field and it was made even better when I looked in the mirror and saw Elmer Fudd.

I got up this morning and grabbed an old retro-styled wool hat.  You know, the kind of hat that has a baseball cap-style bill and ear flaps.  Think Ignatius Reilly from A Confederacy of Dunces if not Elmer Fudd. 

After meeting several clients I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror and saw the hat.  No, I didn’t take it off for meetings.  I didn’t think of it and didn’t notice it.  Thick head. 

I might keep the hat as a part of my sales accoutrement.  It seems to have worked!

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