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Ben Chandler is trying to wrest a House seat from the GOP in Kentucky's Feb 17 special election. As I noted a couple of days ago, the polls look good for Chandler as he enters the campaign's stretch run.
The Chandler campaign has started advertising via BlogAds on a whole slew of progressive blogs. And in less than a day (about 10 hours, actually) online donations had already covered the cost of the ad buy. Pretty impressive testament to the power of cheap blog advertising.
It also means that every dime you donate from here on out will go directly into kicking GOP ass. Add $0.01 to your donation so they know who sent them.
I put myself firmly in the camp that insists on imposing (and enforcing) firm government regulations to smooth the jagged edges off our economic system, particularly in the areas of stock-trading, worker health and safety, and the environment. But I always get the shivers when federal bureaucrats start considering mega-matters. All the more so when the bureaucrats in question occupy consulting cubicles at the Pentagon.
I had a major encounter with just how wrong a federal agency can go in the early 1980s. At that time, with the Soviets pummeling Afghanistan and the Reagan Administration spending us into what were then the biggest deficits in history so as to juice up the Defense Department, there was a lot of scary talk about nuclear war. The answer - skewered so brilliantly in Robert Scheer’s 1983 book With Enough Shovels - was the Federal Emergency Management Agency-directed Crisis Relocation Program.
In short, if our intelligence agencies started getting hints that the USSR was going to launch its nukes in a few days, Americans in high-target areas would evacuate to lower-target areas, cover themselves with radiation-blocking dirt and survive the incoming holocaust while our missiles and bombs cooked the Soviet populace.
I do not exaggerate. Thomas K. Jones, who was then the U.S. Deputy Undersecretary of Defense, Strategic and Theater Nuclear Forces, said:"Dig a hole, cover it with a couple doors and then throw three feet of dirt on top. It's the dirt that does it. If there are enough shovels to go around, everybody's going to make it."
The detailed looniness of this plan included reminders to evacuees to leave forwarding addresses with the Postal Service before departing for their rural foxholes.
I was reminded of FEMA’s CRP plan a few days ago when I read OkiebyAccident’s diary comments and link on David Stipp’s Fortune magazine piece. Stipp examines how the Pentagon is looking into the effects of abrupt climate change and what might be done to adapt.
An excerpt:
But what would abrupt climate change really be like?
Scientists generally refuse to say much about that, citing a data deficit. But recently, renowned Department of Defense planner Andrew Marshall sponsored a groundbreaking effort to come to grips with the question. A Pentagon legend, Marshall, 82, is known as the Defense Department's "Yoda"—a balding, bespectacled sage whose pronouncements on looming risks have long had an outsized influence on defense policy. Since 1973 he has headed a secretive think tank whose role is to envision future threats to national security. The Department of Defense's push on ballistic-missile defense is known as his brainchild. Three years ago Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld picked him to lead a sweeping review on military "transformation," the shift toward nimble forces and smart weapons.
When scientists' work on abrupt climate change popped onto his radar screen, Marshall tapped another eminent visionary, Peter Schwartz, to write a report on the national-security implications of the threat. Schwartz formerly headed planning at Royal Dutch/Shell Group and has since consulted with organizations ranging from the CIA to DreamWorks—he helped create futuristic scenarios for Steven Spielberg's film Minority Report. Schwartz and co-author Doug Randall at the Monitor Group's Global Business Network, a scenario-planning think tank in Emeryville, Calif., contacted top climate experts and pushed them to talk about what-ifs that they usually shy away from—at least in public.
The result is an unclassified report, completed late last year, that the Pentagon has agreed to share with FORTUNE. It doesn't pretend to be a forecast. Rather, it sketches a dramatic but plausible scenario to help planners think about coping strategies. ...
The Pentagon's reaction to this sobering report isn't known—in keeping with his reputation for reticence, Andy Marshall declined to be interviewed. But the fact that he's concerned may signal a sea change in the debate about global warming. At least some federal thought leaders may be starting to perceive climate change less as a political annoyance and more as an issue demanding action.
Yes, that’s the phlegm of cognitive dissonance you hear being cleared from my throat. Was Donald Rumsfeld too busy trying to remake military doctrine and set up his own shadow intelligence operation to notice that the brass had okayed a project to look into something that the Bush Administration doesn’t even believe could happen? Or did he let this slide with rolled eyes, figuring it was merely a soon-to-be-shelved contingency study like the Pentagon’s plans for amphibious landings in Iceland?
The White House Crony List is filled with folks associated with the defunct industry shill known as the Global Climate Coalition, which for years argued (complete with grotesque smears) that global warming was BS, (just as industry once argued that chlorofluorocarbons weren’t punching a hole in the ozone). So it’s no surprise that the whole idea of abrupt climate change - which more and more scientists are coming to accept as common in the planet’s past - is depicted by the Administration as utterly laughable.
The Marshall Report posits all kinds of scenarios, from icier winters in the Northern Hemisphere to drawn-out droughts, from massive movements of refugees to regional wars, from starvation in the hundreds of millions to inundated countries as far-flung as Bangladesh and The Netherlands. Not changes that take place over a century or two, but quickly, over a decade or so.
I’m tempted by my experience to expect that the Pentagon’s proposal for dealing with such potentialities will equal or surpass FEMA's insanity in the '80s.
But, perhaps not. Maybe the Joint Chiefs will come to the President and say, sir, we know Dick Cheney won’t like it and neither will your pals over at the American Petroleum Institute, but we need a real energy plan, one that weans us off fossil fuels like the one proposed by The Apollo Alliance . We know you and your buddies over at the George C. Marshall Institute don’t like the Kyoto Treaty, but we urge you to come up with an even tougher alternative to it right away. We’ve got a problem on our hands, sir, that is worse than terrorism and even steroids, and the nation, the planet, needs you to take action.
But then maybe Bush already has a plan to deal with global warming. Maybe the Mars project is his version of Crisis Relocation.
Tell me that Iowa and NH don't matter. Kerry's double victories have clearly propelled him into front runner status. As we launch this four states tracking, Kerry has huge leads in two states (Missouri and Arizona). He is running competitively in the other two states (South Carolina and Oklahoma). And, as of now, he looks like the only candidate who will emerge from all four states with delegates [...]
"Dean continues to do well in every state among young voters and those who identify themselves as very liberal. At this point, if these numbers hold, Dean could emerge on February 3rd with no delegates from these four states. That would be a significant blow as he heads into Michigan.
Given Dean's change of leadership, I don't think he had much choice but to skip Feb 3. The calendar gets much more favorable for him after Feb 3.
A genetically engineered plant that detects landmines in soil by changing colour could prevent thousands of deaths and injuries by signalling where explosives are concealed.
The plant, a modified version of thale cress (Arabidopsis thaliana), is sensitive to nitrogen dioxide gas, which is released by underground landmines. The leaves of the plant change from green to red after three to five weeks of growth in the presence of this gas. "They are easy to spot," says Carsten Meier of the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, who served as scientific adviser to Aresa, the Danish company that developed the plant.
The team doesn't yet know how sensitive the plant is to nitrogen dioxide, and therefore are not sure how much of the gas is needed to make it turn red.
But they hope the technique will prove useful in field tests. If it does, it should substantially speed up the process of de-mining. Currently, one person can check and clear just two square metres of land a day, says Meier. "Landmines are laid down faster than they are removed," he adds.
So far 150 countries have signed, and 141 have ratified, the 1997 Ottawa Treaty banning the use, production, stockpiling, and transfer of antipersonnel landmines. None of the five permanent members of the United Nations, including the United States, has signed or ratified, although the U.S. has not manufactured any new landmines since 1997.
The good news is that 36 countries (30 signatories and six others) have stopped landmine production altogether, global trade in these weapons has dwindled to a very low level and 50 million anti-personnel mines have been destroyed in the past decade. Each signatory has pledged to destroy its stockpile of such weapons within four years of ratifying the treaty.
But the good news is tempered by the fact that each year, according to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines somewhere in the neighborhood of 15,000 to 20,000 new casualties from landmines occur in 65 countries. In 2002, most of the reported injuries and fatalities happened in countries at peace, and only 15 percent were military personnel.
Adding bioengineered plants to the giant pouched rats and robotic and other mechanical techniques now being used could help remove the scourge of landmines from our planet. But that’s only half the battle - the U.S. and other recalcitrant nations must agree to stop inventing and deploying new types of these devastating weapons. We've got to stop laying them down faster than they can be dug up.
Until there's a way to make political consultants comfortable with the Internet as an advertising vehicle, it will continue to languish as a back-room experiment. Or maybe all it would take is one bold, risk-taking candidate to finally push big money online and win. Then everyone else will follow like a herd of raging elephants and donkeys.
It sorta reminds me of blogs and meetups from a year ago when we told Trippi to get on it quick. A year later, the Trippiless Dean machine is in pause. At least for the moment, Dean has pulled the plug on the big sucking sound that was occurring via the TV media buys. I am actually looking foward to seeing television-media-less results from the 2/3 states. Imagine HD winning a state, or two.
I want to bring up Stirling Newberry's analysis, showing the point where the internet is at now in historical comparison:
While people are wringing their hands over Dean's fall and saying that "the internet" failed, the truth can be seen from a CNN.com exit poll: among those who made up their mind early - these are the political junkies - Dean by 20 points over Kerry. Among those peopel who visited candidate websites "frequently" Dean lead 40-20 over Kerry [conversely, Kerry lead by 40-20 among those who didn't visit websites]. In short, the internet delivered Dean a base of voters - who turned out - and a base of people connected to him - who turned out. The problem with most people talking about the new politics in 2003 is that they thought that it was like the new economy in 1996 - they fell in love with the technology and the tool, and forgot that tools are about what you do with them. They also, swept up in emotion, thought that 2004 was for the internet what 1960 was for Television.
This made two big mistakes: first, it left out that JFK won 1960 not "because" of television, but because of old fashioned working the political system - TV merely tipped the balance in his favor. Second, the internet isn't as far as long as TV was in 1960. The internet is where TV was in the 1950's - the cutting edge of culture, with a disporportionately influential base - but still small. The "frequent" visitors to web sites were 10% of New Hampshire. The broke heavily for Dean. If that number were 30%, which is to say, the difference in television penetration between 1952 and 1956 - then Dean would have been within 2% of Kerry, a dead heat.
The internet then, is currently on the cusp of dominance in terms of info seeking users. Jonah Seiger brings up the catch confronting the new media campaigner:
"There's shorthand among media strategists and pollsters: 'Pump an extra thousand gross ratings points into a market, and we'll see an X percent bump in the unfavorable/favorable ratings,' " Seiger told me. "We don't have a similar lexicon yet for the Internet. There's a difference in the bottom line measure. With traditional media, there's an attitudinal measure, how public opinion has changed, but there's no direct response measure. Internet advertising from the very beginning was sold as a direct response medium. It creates somewhat of a trap."
And the trap is being already addressed by ad vendors. If the methodology is proven enough for major online advertisers such as IBM, HP, Intel, Ford, General Motors, Toyota, P&G;, Kraft & all the major Movie Studios (through online panel surveys that compare "ad-exposed online" vs "not exposed online"), isn't it ready for more than 1-2% (and that's probably on the high-end of the Democratic campaigns) of a campaign's media budget? But the real point is that TV advertising fails to move the dial like it used too, and likewise, in terms of online advertising at the Presidential level, its just waiting to move the needle (especially in terms of offense advertising).
Here's some more data:
TV cost inflation is approximately 8 - 12% per year
It takes ~10X more commercial tonnage to influence the polls on an equivalent basis compared to 1992
Competitive campaigns caught in a tail-chasing spiral over TV share-of-voice but without the historical impact on voters
Voters who do see TV ads often see too many and quickly burnout from over-exposure
21% of Adults under age 30 will get most of their campaign news from the Internet 30% of all online users will engage in online campaign activities (researching candidates, visiting websites, etc.)
Adults who say they will learn about campaigns from the Internet jump dramatically since last election:
It's no secret that Dean has faced some nasty robo-calling and push-polling in Iowa and NH, as well as NM and elsewhere. This exerpt from an upcoming GQ article gives a glimpse of what Dean has faced over the last few weeks:
Fast forward to the days before IA: Trippi's "cell phone rings. It's his pollster, Paul Maslin, who not only has bleak news out of Iowa -- but bleak news out of New Hampshire. Trippi hangs up and stares out the window. His phone rings again. "WHAT? Aw, fuck. I hate this business. This fucking sucks. Okay, thanks." He hangs up. "They're robocalling our ones," he moans. "He has just gotten a report from the field that Dean "ones" are getting bombarded with computer-generated phone calls telling them to make sure to caucus for Dean-then giving them the wrong address." Who would do such a thing? "Kerry," Trippi snaps. "They're the only asshole snake campaign that would do it. Every frickin' day now, I'm reminded of why I got out of this in the first place."
The Dean campaign keeps fingering the Kerry camp, and it's hard to see who else might be responsible.
The calls were targeted at Dean in Iowa and NH -- the two states that were must-wins for both Dean and Kerry. Gephardt might've been behind a robo-calling effort in Iowa, but he'd have no reason to do the same in NH.
Who else, the Republicans? Problem is that by all reports, these robo calls have specifically targeted Dean's "1s" and "2s". That level of sophistication would require an extent of polling unlikely from the GOP. Only Kerry would have conducted the type of polling identifying levels of support for Dean in both Iowa and NH.
So it's all anecdotal, but the evidence suggests dirty tricks from the Kerry campaign. The thought literally makes me want to puke (some of the calls suggest Dean is not a real Christian because he's married to a Jew). None of the other candidates have faced this type of puke tactics, so there's only one guy engaging in it.
Kerry 41 (6) Edwards 17 (5) Dean 17 (19) Clark 8 (15)
SUSA says:
Clark & Edwards run strong in the Ozarks, Dean in KC, Kerry in central and eastern MO. Kerry support skews old, Dean's support skew's young, middle-aged voters are divided. Core Democrats back Kerry; Edwards disproportionately strong among MO independents.
We know Dean won't contest any of these states heavily, angling instead to pick up delegates with 2nd and 3rd place showings. Will Edwards spend coin to contest Kerry?
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