Zach has previously written about the “Promise of our Democracy” dinners in last Thursday’s issue. Look for it on dailycardinal.com.
Last Wednesday was the first part of the “Promise of Our Democracy” dialogue hosted by the Interactivity Foundation. It is a series of dinners where people split up into small groups with about six to eight people in each to talk about how we can make our democracy better. Being able to see people really flesh out how they think about things is special. The one thing that I noticed there that just blew me away was how nuanced people were. And it is not just about having mixed views, because that does not capture how different people can be.
Whitney Houston's death was first reported on Twitter. The Arab Spring was both organized and disseminated on Twitter. Twitter has even started a new account just for "spotlighting best practices and innovative uses of Twitter by journalists and newsrooms." That said, social media is not being utilized everywhere-in particular, not in local newsrooms.
According to the newspapers I read, we have "bad" political discourse. What does bad political discourse look like? It is a lot of yelling, and its language is inflammatory; Gov. Scott Walker being heckled at the State of the State speech comes to mind. Most importantly, the problem with a bad political discourse is that nothing gets done.
The Republican primary season is certainly going to be interesting, if the preceding months are any indication. However, most people are going to draw the wrong lessons from it. It is true that the polls have fluctuated because there is no clear frontrunner. But the conclusion most draw from this—that there is no frontrunner because the field is weak—is almost certainly wrong. On the contrary, the Republican base’s problem is that its candidates are too strong.
With the recall effort more successful than anticipated, Gov. Scott Walker has been increasingly on the defensive. In particular, Walker has had to justify the 2011 Budget Repair Bill that took away collective bargaining rights for most public workers and reduced the amount of benefits they received. Thus it is natural that Walker has been spending a lot of time promoting studies claiming that the legislation has been successful in saving jobs. At least, that’s what Scott Walker wants the numbers to say. But are the findings accurate? Unfortunately for the governor, the answer is a lot less clear than he claims.
I have been talking with my progressive friends about Gov. Scott Walker lately. I’ll be the first to admit that Walker’s policies have had mixed results at best. I stand with my progressive friends in opposing his budget cuts—after all, it is a recession which is the worst time to cut government spending. But my friends also want to hold a special recall election to kick him out of office early. I disagree.
I know talking about schools bores most people in Wisconsin, but something interesting has been overlooked for the past few weeks. State Rep. Mark Radcliffe, D-River Falls, has introduced a bill in the Wisconsin state Legislature giving high school students the option of skipping traditional academic classes in favor of vocational ones.
I really tried not to like Rep. Dan LeMahieu's plan to allocate Wisconsin's Electoral College votes by congressional district, following a scheme known as the Congressional District Method.
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