Tag Archives: Saturday Night Live

Boot the Mute

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Cursor_and_Minnesota_gets_D-_grade_in_2015_State_Integrity_Investigation___Center_for_Public_IntegrityWhen Republicans took over the Minnesota House of Representatives, they got their chance to show Minnesotans their preferred style of governing.

Think of all of the things Republicans could have done to strut their stuff for voters. They could have enacted reforms to improve Minnesota laws regarding public access to information. They might have reformed Minnesota laws related to legislative accountability, ethics enforcement or state pension fund management. After all, the Center for Public Integrity gives Minnesota — a state that often can’t stop congratulating itself about how ethical it’s government is — an “F” grade in all of those areas.  DFLers didn’t improve governnance in those areas, so Republicans could have showed them up.

But instead, Republicans leaders have, I kid you not, installed a “master mute” button in the House chambers to shush debate that discomforts them.  MinnPost’s Briana Bierschbach  explains the scene when Minnesota’s first learned of the button’s existence:

On May 22 (2016), with less than an hour to go before a deadline to finish work for the 2016 legislative session, the bonding bill landed on the floor of the Minnesota House of Representatives.

Republican House Speaker Kurt Daudt, standing at the rostrum in front of the chamber, quickly readied the nearly $1 billion package of construction projects for a final vote, but Democrats in the minority weren’t happy. Several members picked up their microphones and shouted in protest, saying there wasn’t enough time to read the entire bill, much less make any changes to the proposal.

Then an odd thing happened: For those watching the chaos on the House chamber’s livestream video feed, the shouting abruptly stopped. Then it started back up, until suddenly voices were cut off again, some midsentence. Daudt, who is shown in the House video standing at the rostrum, pushes something off to his right on the desk several times.

It turns out Daudt was utilizing a new feature installed in the Minnesota House chambers ahead of the 2016 session: A “master mute” button.

News_about__mnleg_on_TwitterThe reality of the mute button is pretty horrifying. Regulating debate should continue to be done with the traditional, predictable, and ever-civil Mason’s Manual of Legislative Procedure, not the impulsive flick of a politicians’ index finger.  Mason’s doesn’t need a mute.

But as bad as the reality of the mute button is, the political optics is worse. Keep in mind the national context for this Minnesota action. At the national level, we have a Republican Congressman bellowing “you lie” in the middle of a President’s State of the Union Address. We have a Republican U.S. Senate Leader  censoring and scolding a Senator for daring to quote a civil rights leader’s assessment of a nominee tasked with enforcing the nation’s civil rights laws. We have a Republican President who cuts off anyone who questions him with a loud and dismissive “quiet,” “no you’re the puppet,” “you’re a nasty woman,” “go back to UniVision,” “wrong, “get em outta here,” and “knock the crap outta them.”

With that as Minnesota Republicans’ ignominious national backdrop, you would think they would be working extra hard to show that they are as civil and transparent as Minnesotans demand. But if you wanted to showcase a party’s insecurity, hubris, and disrespect for free speech, you could not come up with a more outrageous prop than a “master mute” button. It feels like something out of an over-the-top Saturday Night Live or Monte Python skit, not something a state party would do to prove that it isn’t as rude and authoritarian as it’s historically unpopular national leader.  Minnesota Republicans are absolutely tone-deaf on this issue.

The Minnesota House’s mute button is obscene and an attack on our free speech values. So legislators, let’s immediately vote to remove it, apologize to Minnesotans, snip the wires, patch the shameful podium scar, and move forward with blissfully raucous democratic debates about improving ordinary Minnesotans’ lives.

“Pussy Hat Nation” is Bigly-er than Trump.

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NEW BLOG PHOTO_edited- 2The one certain thing we can take away from the enormous turn-out for Saturday’s Women’s Marches — all around the world, including Antarctica — is that for as big a story as the Trump administration is, the resistance to it is every bit as large. It is just as unprecedented.

In normal times there’d be a big show of protest like last weekend. Everyone would bus and fly into D.C. or hump it across town to gather with kindred souls and make a lot of noise for an afternoon. And then the crowd would go back to their regular gigs, getting the kids through school, putting on a new deck, planning for spring break. But “normal” is so 2015.

Millions of pretty neighborly, everyday people recognize that we’ve seriously parted ways with “normal.” What we can bank on now is that Donald Trump, the man with perhaps the lowest emotional IQ of anyone ever to set foot in the White House, much less preside over it, will be a constant, daily-to-hourly source of infuriation for everyone who turned out this past weekend … all around the world.  Make that “infuriation” and “embarrassment”.

Look for example at what one day of marches wrought.

The guy makes a courtesy call on the CIA and lies to their faces about ever dissing them or suggesting they were undermining him “like Nazi Germany” and then spirals off that into a hissy id-fit about the media lying about the size of the crowd for his inauguration. He follows that by sending his hapless spox, Sean Spicer, (soon to be a regular “Saturday Night Live” bit), to add a half dozen more instantly disprovable lies on top of everything he himself said. This then leads to the Strangelovian notion of “alternative facts”, from Trump’s grossly over-exposed White House “counselor” Kellyanne Conway, already an “SNL” meme.

(BTW: If you were wondering about the cheering at that CIA event. There’s this today from CBS News: “U.S. government sources tell CBS News that there is a sense of unease in the intelligence community after President Trump’s visit to CIA headquarters on Saturday.  An official said the visit ‘made relations with the intelligence community worse’ and described the visit as ‘uncomfortable’. Authorities are also pushing back against the perception that the CIA workforce was cheering for the president. They say the first three rows in front of the president were largely made up of supporters of Mr. Trump’s campaign.  An official with knowledge of the make-up of the crowd says that there were about 40 people who’d been invited by the Trump, Mike Pence and Rep. Mike Pompeo teams. The Trump team expected Rep. Pompeo, R-Kansas, to be sworn in during the event as the next CIA director, but the vote to confirm him was delayed on Friday by Senate  Democrats. Also sitting in the first several rows in front of the president was the CIA’s senior leadership, which was not cheering the remarks.’)

Follow what will be a routine cycle of cause-and-effect.

Universally observable event occurs. (Trump inauguration draws 1/6th of Obama’s and 1/3rd of the Women’s March). Trump declares it all a lie cooked up by “most dishonest people in the world.” Which reminds and reaffirms in the minds of the significant majority of the public who voted against him that his dishonesty is dwarfed by his astonishing insecurity. Which sets off a fresh frenzy of social media mockery. Which infuriates him further. Which keeps his limited attention span focused on affronts to his ego. Which generates more counter-attacks riddled with absurd lies. Which … well you get it.

Point being, this is not going to stop, until something breaks, and the chances are better that Trump breaks down than 60, 80,100 million … around the planet, who have the benefit of reality on their side. Character is destiny, and Trump, who no one can imagine preparing himself for the intellectual rigors of the Oval Office much less the constant assault on personal inadequacies that comes with the territory, is a character suited only for tabloid-style combat. Paper-thin ego gratification is the essence of his game.

Personally, I continue to have a “House of Cards” view of what’s coming over the horizon. It is all too plausible that the Russians (via loans to Trump by Putin-friendly oligarchs if not incontinent hookers) have blackmail leverage on him, leverage that guys like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell are only too happy to apply to keep Trump their bitch. But if he is as wholly delusional as we are certain he is, the fun starts when he decides they are his bitches.

Bigly wrong-o, O Orange One.

Without getting their hands too dirty, entrenched institutional power-play Republicans like Ryan and McConnell can release no end of pressure to drive Trump into a virtual death-spiral of insane threats and name-calling. Having neither affinity or respect for Trump, it’s a scenario you know they’ve already entertained, since their preferred stooge, Mike Pence, is ready and willing to serve without histrionic turmoil should Trump suffer a debilitating medical incident, resign in frustration or be politically neutered by Anonymous or WikiLeaks or some hacker spitting up his tax returns.

Meanwhile, every step of the way to that point is a vast middle-class insurgency not just opposed to Trump but viscerally disgusted by him, to a level they never despised George W. Bush. Every day Trump will say or do something to stoke that insurgency of nice, well-educated women in pink pussy hats like a coal feeder into a blast furnace. He’s incapable of doing anything else.

But the story of that insurgency is bigger than Trump.

Twenty Debates? Oh No, Mr. Bills!

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“Less is more,” minimalist designers tell us.  “The law of diminishing returns,” economists explain.

And so it goes with campaign debates.

Campaign debates serve a lot of important purposes for our democracy. They are a more efficient way to communicate with voters than door-knocking or pressing the flesh one clammy hand at a time.  They get candidates off-script, which captures rare moments of candor, humor, humanity, intelligence, stupidity and reality.  They cover more issues than ads, direct mail and other forms of political communications, which exposes candidates’ depth, or shallowness.

But clearly, there can be too much of a good thing.  In the 2010 gubernatorial campaign, Mark Dayton, Tom Horner, and Tom Emmer debated and debated, and debated some more.  They debated an eye-glazing 25 times.  Most of the debates ended up getting ignored by reporters, and just about everyone else, because they became complete and utter re-runs. I mean, even if you love Gilligan’s Island, and who amongst us does not,  the 25th time you see a re-run about Gilligan’s pedal powered bamboo car is significantly less riveting than the first 5 times.

As Washington University political scientist Steven Smith observed about the 2010 marathon debate-a-thon:

 “…there is a point of diminishing returns and I think in the Minnesota case we may have reached the point in the last month where there have been so many debates that the individual debates just don’t receive much attention.

Now in 2012, State Representative Kurt Bills wants to debate U.S. Senator Amy Kloubachar 20 times over about 90 days.  This desire likely has less to do with Bills‘ love of debates than it does with the fact that his campaign is broke and having a difficult time delivering his oddball Wellstonian-libertarian fusion messaging.

Though Kloubachar is a bright and skilled debater, her campaign strategists would prefer to keep the popular incumbent in highly controlled settings until Election Day, to preserve her large lead.  Therefore, so far they have agreed to two debates.  For context, former U.S. Senator Norm Coleman agreed to debate challenger Al Franken five times.

Somewhere between Kloubachar’s 2 and Bills’ 20 is a reasonable number.  I’d say the number is no higher than 10.

Here is my rationale:  Most of what is learned by undecided voters through debates is conveyed through news coverage.  After all, the people actually attending the debates, or monitoring them start-to-finish on TV or radio, are predominantly voters who made up their minds long ago.  So, when the news coverage stops, the debates pretty much stop yielding benefits for undecided voters.

Minnesota’s newsrooms continue to shrink dramatically, and are decreasingly willing to cover politics, particularly broadcast news outlets.   Given those unfortunate trends, I find it difficult to believe that the Minnesota’s press corps will give decent coverage to more than about 10 debates.

So, I’m all for debates.  And two is not enough.  But oh no, Mr. Bills, not 20.

– Loveland

 

Note:  This post also was featured as a “best of the best” on MinnPost’s Blog Cabin feature.