With the vote on the mayor of Irving and several council places due this weekend, candidate placards have been springing up on lawns near my house like overnight mushrooms.
Being the sort of vaguely-techie person that I am, I decided to investigate the candidates for Mayor and for council Place 5 (which is my local area).
(DISCLAIMER - I cannot currently vote because I am not yet a citizen. Soon, that will change).
To my amazement, despite the best part of 30 minutes of searching, I could find a web site for 3 of the mayoral candidates and 2 of the Place 5 candidates.
It is interesting to note that not only is all politics local (as the late Tip O'Neill famously said), it also seems to be behind the times when it comes to message communication.
What little I managed to glean on the candidates from reading Irving and Dallas newspaper and commentary sights did not enthuse me very much. Every candidate seems to be saying more or less the same things: "preserve the tax base","respect minorities","encourage businesses to come here", "tighten up code enforcement", "make the streets safe" etc. etc. All worthy things, but these fall into the category of what I call GMHAP (God MotherHood and Apple Pie); saying that "we need to persuade businesses to come here" is kind of like saying to your neighbour "you know it would be a good idea if you breathed a few thousand times today". It's a "duh!" statement. I looked in vain for any Different Ideas or evidence of some imagination.
I also noted that turnout in the last mayoral election was extremely low - only around 15% of eligible electors voted. With that level of turnout, and what I can see of the quality of the candidates, I think that local governance here in Irving is in some trouble.
All of this has spurred me to realize that I really don't know much about the dynamics and finances of Irving. I will be working to rectify that knowledge deficit in the coming months.

Link: http://www.sethf.com/gore/

One of the more interesting or infuriating (depending on your point of view) features of journalism, and the recording of history, is how quotations and words are ascribed to people mistakenly, leading to the promulgation of a myth.
It is well known (for example) that Humphrey Bogart never actually uttered the words "Play it again Sam" in the movie "Casablanca", but that does not stop a lot of people believing that he did. This canard has been consistently repeated for decades. Bogart impersonators always use the line in their acts, gaining instant audience recognition; no matter if they don't look like Bogart, or talk like Bogart, all they have to do is utter the phrase "play it again Sam" and everybody knows who they are impersonating.
This example could be said to be relatively harmless; however, what is not harmless is the extension of this distortion into more weighty matters such as politics and world leadership. Here we can find many egregious examples of political statements being distorted and in some cases almost completely fabricated. A good example is the statement supposedly made by the British Prime Minister James Callaghan in 1979, when, on returning from a summit in the West Indies to a country suffering electrical power outages due to strikes, he supposedly said "crisis? what crisis?". The reality is that he never made that statement. (What he actually said was, "I don't think that other people in the world would share the view that there is mounting chaos.") However, the Sun newspaper promptly reported him as saying "Crisis? What Crisis?". The supposed statement soon became emblematic of a government that was widely seen as not in control of events, and it was constantly repeated in the 1979 general election which resulted in the defeat of Callaghan's government and the election of Margaret Thatcher.
More recently, politicians, commentators, and comedians have had a field day with the supposed statement by Al Gore that he "invented the Internet". Only problem is - he said no such thing. This whole canard has been thoroughly debunked. While Gore may have given a rambling, self-promoting answer to a question on a CNN interview, research will show that he was correct in the substance of his assertion - that he had consistently given support to the concept of an "Information Superhighway" in the late 1980's through the mid 1990's. Yet, a single statement that he made was distorted beyond the limits of valid interpretation and used as a stick with which to beat him. Effectively a falsehood was converted to an accepted truth.
All of us need to be on our guard against the promulgation of supposed "facts" by a media that tends to deal in sensationalism. There is an old saying in the tabloid press that one should never let the facts get in the way of a good story, and sadly, a lot of modern journalistic outlets are only too willing to distort and mis-report statements if that will cause a news splash. Next time somebody claims "Al Gore says he invented the Internet", it might be a good idea to remind them that the statement is nonsense, and remind them that we need to critically examine all media reports, and avoid the nice easy, smug, funny conclusions that are sometimes handed down. Distortion of reality is a stock-in-trade of unscrupulous politicians, leaders and would-be-demagogues. If we accept nonsensical distortions like these, we make it all too easy for those dysfunctional types of leaders to thrive, control our lives and ultimately send mankind in the wrong direction.
This is serious. We need to keep our critical faculties awake, and our bullshit detectors operative.

Link: http://kromeisburning.blogspot.com/2005/03/your-social-security-response-kit.html

I have been living in the USA for nearly 7 years. Every year I get a Social Security Statement from the government. This year's statement shows that in 2 more years, at my current salary, I will become eligible for Social Security benefits when I retire.
This means that I will soon have a dog in the Social Security fight, so I found the above link that attempts to cut through some of the simplistic nonsense currently being bandied about on the subject of Social Security reform here in the USA.
It is also worth noting that in the late 1980's, the government in the UK attempted to scale back Social Security benefits (by abandoning the earnings-related component of the pension system) and persuade people to "contract out" of the state pension system, in order to address what was seen as the inevitable rise in pension costs to an untenable level after 2020. At the time, rosy predictions were made about the much better returns on private pension funds.
I have a private pension fund in the UK, and I can tell you that every one of those initial predictions has been steadily replaced by much less optimistic predictions. At one time, predictions were that my retirement fund would be worth nearly half a million pounds, now the predictions are for it to be worth around half of that amount.
I would caution anybody looking into the Social Security issue here in the USA to be very wary of any predictions of future returns made by private corporations. Ask yourself; whose interests are they looking out for?

I found this article posted on The Well, which I am reproducing here in case anybody wants to investigate further:

Interesting guest on John Stewart last night, an economist who has released
a book called Freakonomics, which applies economic theory and formulas to
everyday life issues. One thing the studied was the societal effects of
abortion, and their model credited Roe V Wade for enabling the lower crime
rates of the 90s much more than the increased police forces. The basic
theory being that unwanted children are more likely to grow up to be
antisocial. John actually did a pretty good job of grilling the guy on what
else might be involved, but the guy was unflappable on his analysis, saying
they had considered all of those other factors and still considered
legalized abortion to be key based on their statistical analysis of crime
rates in states with high abortion rates versus states with low abortion
rates.

The following quote appears in a review of a bio of John Kenneth Galbraith that appears in Eric Alterman's blog on MSNBC:

Government by the free consent of the governed has given way to government by the implicit acquiescence of the adequately distracted. We don’t want to know that the world is complicated and asks our attention. We want to watch The Apprentice.

For me, this is a pretty good summary of the underlying malaise that afflicts modern "Western" democracies.

Link: http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/story.jsp?story=633717

The (in)famous advice by the UK Attorney-General, Lord Goldsmith, to PM Tony Blair on the legality of participating in the US-led war on Iraq has finally been published - and the timing could not have been worse with a UK general election only 1 week away.
Blair is now likely to spend the next 7 days ducking and weaving, since the published documents clearly show that the advice given was far from the unambiguous endorsement that Blair claimed he had received at the time. For example, referring to the assertion that the then-existing U.N. resolutions authorized the war, Lord Goldsmith politely demurred and wrote:
"In these circumstances, I remain of the opinion that the safest legal course would be to secure the adoption of a further resolution to authorise the use of force."
The full text of the advice is here.
Lord Goldsmith is already ducking and weaving and issuing press releases in an attempt to justify the way that his advice was written. Incredibly, Blair was continuing to insist as late as yesterday that the advice authorized the war as legal. He seems to be following a common political tactic of consistently repeating falsehoods in the hope that they will eventually be perceived as the truth.
Watching this unfold from Dallas reminds me of the quote from Daniel Patrick Moynihan to the effect that everybody is entitled to their own opinions, but not their own set of facts.

Link: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7646371/

Well, a study apparently shows that Texas has the highest percentage of people without health coverage in the USA.
Another item for Kinky Friedman to remind Texans about in his 2006 gubernatorial campaign (to go alongside #48 in education, but #1 in executions).

Link: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7654245/

In this MSNBC article, Stan Crock does an excellent job of attempting (just for a moment) to shift the spotlight away from some of the alleged more tawdry and juicy aspects of John Bolton's personality (bullying, vindictiveness etc.) towards the more fundamental issue of: is John Bolton qualified to be the next U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations?
He concludes that, no, Bolton is not qualified for the role.
Personally, I would have a hard time taking anybody seriously for the role of liaison with a world governing body if one of their past recorded comments was to the effect that if 10 stories were removed from the governing body's HQ, that would make no difference, but, hey, one of the prime qualifications for modern politics seems to be the ability to completely change your mind without offering any substantive explanation beyond a mumbled "that was then and this is now".