Across the Great Divide

Does the Pawlenty Hand Know What the Kennedy Hand is Doing?

This is rich! For a week, Republicans have been throwing an absolute shitfit over the  purloined Kennedy ad and the moral turpitude of any DFLer within a mile of it. The National Republican Senatorial Committee is still flogging the issue and pelting the Klobuchar campaign with questions.

And today, this email blast goes out from the Pawlenty campaign.

[click to enlarge]

Just to recap, in case there are any slow kids in the room:

• Klobuchar campaign learns of an unreleased Kennedy ad.
• Fires communications director.
• Files report with FBI.
• Apologizes to Kennedy, who shuts down website except for donation page.

• Pawlenty campaign learns of unreleased ad by 527 group.
• Issues preemptive mailing accompanying an appeal for campaign donations.

I think this calls for some NRSC-like questions.

• How did the campaign learn about the planned ad and its scheduled broadcast?
• How does the campaign know it is a “negative attack ad”?
• Has anyone associated with the campaign viewed the ad or its content?
• Please provide a chronology of events from the time the campaign learned of the ad to its issuance of the email on 9/26.
• How else has any information about the ad been used by the campaign?
• Does the organization have in place an operation designed to detect in advance placement of media by 527 groups or competing campaigns?
• Please detail how this information is gathered, and explain how the process does not violate confidentiality between the media and its customers.

Who thought this would be a good idea?

Maybe the Republican machine isn't so tight after all.

A Semi-Big Question

I suppose I could do some research myself to answer this question, but not today...

Reading the Strib's "What's the State of Our State?" series that began today (and isn't even visible on the home page, so forget a link), I noted that the state's list of "impaired" waters is growing every year as Minnesota tries to comply with federal law.

This year, about $15 million was earmarked to get started on an estimated $1 billion cleanup. At that rate, it's a 67-year project, assuming waters don't get any worse. But that's not the question.

It's this: How unequal are federal clean water mandates among states — especially if states have to come up with the money? Minnesota presumably has a much bigger liability than, say Utah or Nevada. Not because we're derelict, but because we have more water.

I might've found the answer had I read the Strib's entire "water series." Oh, well.

At least unfunded mandates to educate kids are roughly proportionate among states. I wonder if there are others like this?

The Mind Behind the Cash Register

[T]hose who value transparency in government should place a similar value on simplicty. Massively complicated systems can never be transparent. That being the case, I'd as soon have a simple system where fraud is actively hidden by our leaders, rather than a complicated system where the fraud is likely to be out in the open and nobody notices.
– Oil is for Sissies

Over the weekend, I made an ironic cross-town pilgrimage to Hiawatha Cyclery — driving 26 miles round trip to buy a large bike basket so I could haul more groceries, and thus reduce my driving and save gas...

I went out of my way because the proprietor writes Oil is for Sissies, which grazes over an appealing trifecta (to me, at least) of cycling, peak oil and libertarian thinking.

Read this post and some others written by a young guy running a hole-in-the-wall neighborhood bike shop. Then ask yourself: How many times a day do I overlook the chance to connect with remarkable people?

 

We Can Fix Healthcare if We Don't Care Which Party Gets Credit.

I just spent close to five hours with a Republican.

Since he also spent five hours with me, I don't want to identify him. He may be running for office in a year or so in a suburban district that sends Republicans to the legislature, and I don't want any good words from me to mess up his chances.

He's a guy you might revile if you only sort of knew him. He's made big money working for several different big companies, including a local one that does not enjoy a great reputation. He has several deals in the fire now that will make him even more money. He seems like the prototypical Gooper with the big house on The Lake.

We were talking about access to healthcare, a topic he knows a lot about. In fact, he says, when he sells his company, he's going to devote himself to getting affordable healthcare for every American.

We could do it right now, he says, with the amount of money we spend today, just by changing the insurance system.

In a nutshell, America spends about $2 trillion for all types of healthcare — from eyeglasses and prescriptions and tummy tucks to neonatal intensive care, hospice and catastrophic illness coverage. If costs continue rising at the current rate, we'll be spending $4 trillion, or 20% of the GDP, by 2015. Half of that $2 trillion is spent by the government or government programs, including Medicare payments.

The current system works only because the premiums paid by the healthy help subsidize the costs for catastrophic illness and technology-intensive treatments, he says. As technology costs increase, insurers have to set premiums at a rate to cover the higher costs. Last year, the annual premium for a family of four under an employer health plan averaged $11,000.

He says that by restructuring private insurance to cover just the first $10,000 of medical costs, and creating a pool of government money plus some premium dollars to cover the expensive treatments, we could use the same total pot of money to cover all Americans. Or at least make insurance affordable for virtually all Americans. How affordable? He says about $250 a month for a family of four that costs nearly four times that today.

Now I was drinking beer and not taking notes, so my version may miss a few details. But the bottom line is still this: We can make health care affordable if we change the system.

But both parties need to be able to agree and not be looking for partisan advantage. That's what has killed efforts so far to push this through Congressional committees, he says.

I'm going to look closer at candidates' proposals now. I'm going to separate commitment to the principle from having clue how to accomplish affordable health care. I won't be able to vote for this guy, but I'll sure consider helping his campaign.

Did I mention he was a Republican?

I'm So Disappointed in the Liberal Blogger Who Stole Johnny Knoxville's Cherry Pie

After reading the wrong theater's show time, we arrived early for a showing of "All the King's Men." Since we were with friends, it wouldn't be a big deal to sit and chat for 25 minutes. But threading our way through the cineplex, the liberal blogger in our group suggested we duck into another screening to fill up the wait.

The perfect opportunity was right there — a plotless flick composed entirely of short, self-contained bits. It wouldn't matter whether we came in the middle or near the end, and we could leave without wondering how things turned out.

So we snuck into "Jackass II."

I say "snuck" because no one darting into a movie without paying — especially illicitly attending the cinematic work of Johnny Knoxville — would ever have "sneaked." His intellectual property was sitting there unprotected, except for a naugahyde padded door and a small poster that did not match the name on our ticket.

Unprotected as one of mom's cherry pies cooling in the window. And I stole it. (Okay, just a piece of it.)

I would not consider myself part of the film's target market. I did not see the original "Jackass" or the MTV show that spawned it. What little I did know about Mr. Knoxville's work led me to expect tasteless, stupid behavior that only Bluto and Booger might find entertaining.

Surely, watching a few minutes of such worthless tripe would not constitute stealing or anything else illegal. Rather, it would be like watching an extended trailer of a movie I would never see.

Perhaps the most shocking part of watching Knoxville and his cohorts imitate Wiley Coyote those few minutes was this. I laughed. Hard. Again and again. My friend and I kept laughing after our wives departed. We were laughing still, in the car on the way to dinner.

The responses to what we all saw split cleanly along gender lines, as each of these reviews reflects.

I wish to issue an apology to Mr. Knoxville for stealing his movie. I am ashamed of myself and the bad light my unethical behavior casts upon the liberal blogosphere and all the DFL candidates of whom I have spoken favorably. I understand and accept the decision by any candidate to distance themselves from me and by bloggers never link to Across the Great Divide as long as they live.

Today, I am submitting this link to the FBI. On Monday, I will consult an attorney. By Wednesday evening, I will email Johnny Knoxville with the link as well.

And, please, I beseech you, do not try to excuse my behavior or replicate it. Enough damage has been done already.

The Real Domestic Terror

Take a look at today's Strib front page. No, I don't mean the ever-morphing online edition. Look at the two top stories in the print edition.

One brace of stories covers the death penalty verdict for rapist and murderer Alfonso Rodriguez Jr. The other tells the horrific tale of how Steven Van Keuren broke into a woman's home and murdered her and a friend. Read how he terrorized her and her kids, despite a restraining order.

Now ask yourself, would the death penalty have made one bit of difference for Teri Lee, the murdered woman, and Tim Hawkinson, the man trying to protect her? Or for Dru Sjodin? Or the monster who dragged a still-unidentified woman to death in Colorado?

For that matter, would it have deterred any of the 1,247 murders of women who were killed by an intimate partner in 2000? Or of the 7,205 people killed in 2003 by family members, boy/girlfriends, neighbors and other acquaintances?

According to a 1999 report by the Minnesota State Planning Department (the department no longer issues reports because it was eliminated by budget cutters), domestic abuse and unwanted sexual activity went unreported 90% of the time — the highest for any crime category. Victims of aggravated assault involving a weapon said 52% of offenders were family members, and half of sexual assault victims knew the attacker as a casual acquaintance.

We are spending billions to protect ourselves against foreigners we will never meet who have not killed anyone in the U.S. in five years. Yet people we do know, people someone has reason to fear, and people we can find almost any day of the year, will keep racking up the death total year after year.

These are the real domestic terrorists.

You can't take a tube of toothpaste or a cup of coffee on board an airplane. But hey, it's gotta be working. Look how safe we've been kept from terrorist attacks. Keep up the good work, boys!

Meanwhile, the kids of Teri Lee have to wonder who will ever keep them safe.

You Never Have to be Embarrassed About Playing Clean

Yesterday, the Hewlett-Packard Board Chair resigned over the company's investigation into boardroom media leaks. You may remember a certain attorney general candidate having a little trouble with an investigation he commissioned that also got out of hand.

Bloggers who aspire to be expose artists, take note. Likewise, campaign tricksters. You really don't want to be doing the press conference where you sort of apologize and then slink off, do you?

Although there are some differences, the K-K-K ad flap (you really don't need links by now, do you?) reminds me of an incident that helped shape my views on confidentiality far more than my experiences handling classified defense documents.

Before I started in the agency business, I edited a client magazine for my employer, Honeywell. We worked with an outside agency to produce it, including art direction and hiring writers for some of the articles.

One day I got a call from another manager in our company who'd just had a conversation with an intern in her department. The intern had been at a party where a low-level staffer was talking about a magazine his firm was working on. He was describing some of the articles in preparation and saying how he was going to do something to screw up the magazine because it was being published by a war-mongering company.

It was obviously our magazine, though apparently the talker hadn't named Honeywell. It may just have been a kid with too much to drink trying to impress friends, but...

I immediately called the head of the agency and told him what I knew. Within a short time, he called back with an apology, a description of his investigation and news that the individual had been fired.

"I didn't ask for the person to be fired," I said, thinking the young person might've learned their lesson  about talking out of school another way. "I just thought you should know what was going on in your firm so you could deal with it."

This is how we deal with violations of client confidentiality, he said. It's just not acceptable.

Maybe the fired employee hadn't been there long enough to absorb that agency's culture of integrity, but I'm certain everyone there got the point reinforced that day. And the agency earned additional respect from me.

Amy Klobuchar's campaign fired a much more important staffer for simply viewing a Kennedy ad that was soon going to be seen by a million people. This is akin to a golfer calling a penalty on himself for a rule violation his opponent didn't witness. But the Republican smear machine is crying foul — over something it's doubtful they would have even known happened save for Klobuchar acting in a forthright, ethical manner.

***    ***    ***

In addition to past posts here, I've been commenting on this subject on a few other blogs. This post will draw together some of those points and thoughts on what options the principals had. Nobody's perfect here, but some come off better than others.

The Klobuchar Campaign
A young activist who is striving to make a name for himself as an investigative blogger sends a link to an unreleased Kennedy ad. The staffer looked at the ad — who wouldn't? — but then showed it to several others. When higher-ups find out, the staffer is dismissed, the FBI is notified and then the Kennedy campaign is informed.

In my view, the only thing better would have been for the recipient to look at the ad and right then call her counterpart at the Kennedy campaign. Given the nastiness that has infected too many races, maybe there wasn't a civil relationship left.

The Kennedy Campaign
Kennedy's agency has done a poor job of securing its client's work and the campaign has no clue of it. When informed by Klobuchar, it affects outrage at Klobuchar and then shuts down its campaign site — which is supposed to be accessible to the public — to create the false impression that Kennedy is directly under some kind of cyberattack.

Instead, Kennedy could have thanked Klobuchar's campaign for exposing the breach and filing a report with the FBI — essentially on Kennedy's behalf — and then had a heart-to-heart with its ad agency about confidentiality.

Noah Kunin

As I posted in the comments at MCR:

7 

PJ says:

September 22nd, 2006 at 11:27 am

 

I’d agree that what Kunin did was unethical. But the spin being put on the issue to call it “hacking” is absolutely absurd. As Joe points out, there was no security to breach to view the ad- the use of a password field presents a false image of security when there really was none. I’d liken this to walking down the street at night and looking in someone’s windows when they fail to draw the curtains. That’s a far cry from breaking into someone’s house.

8

Charlieq says:

September 23rd, 2006 at 6:04 am

 

Once Noah saw what was in the house, he had several options:
• Notify the agency/Kennedy how shoddy their security practices were
• Use the experience in a story about the relationship with Howell and/or the lack of security
• Preview the ad in his own blog
• Get advice from other bloggers
• Forget the whole thing

Unfortunately, he looked in the house, brought  someone else, and said, lookee.

[In a subsequent comment, Mark Gislesen points out, it's not a house at all...]

Barring any other nonsense, it's time to move on.

 

Where Are the Grownups?

The latest flare up over the supposed filching of Mark Kennedy's trade secrets — that his losing, directionless campaign is desperately trying to turn into some kind of Klobucharian plot — reminded me of a conversation several weeks ago.

Someone was fantacizing that the Independence Party could cut a deal with the Democrats. Mike Hatch drops out in favor of Peter Hutchinson, in exchange for the votes of the Independence Party.

The trouble with that, I said — and it was not the only trouble — is the Independence Party is not really a party. Meaning it couldn't deliver votes.

But I'd like to amend that statement. At least the Independence Party is acting like a party.

The Republicans can't decide whether they should publicly support their president. They send campaign officials to protest the other party's events. They attack opponents with egregiously false mailings, not to mention unpaid staffers and bloggers who aren't even working for the campaign. They barely post any policy-related information on their campaign sites, and then take them down for security reasons. They employ sub-literate functionaries to pummel the blogosphere with party press releases and misleading attacks. They act as if governing were the last thing they want to talk about.

The Democrats can't unite behind one of the most decent and exciting candidates they've had in awhile because they're afraid of the Republican slime machine. They've endured embarrassing withdrawals of candidates, and they can't decide whether their endorsement process should be followed. While the right-wing media form an echo chamber, the Dems can achieve at best a rapidly decaying digital delay. The gubernatorial nominee, like his Republican counterpart, is focusing on his own race, dodging debates and leaving party leadership to a press release jockey who is only marginally less annoying than the other side's.

In contrast, the Independence Party presents a united slate of candidates who act like professionals instead of professional politicians. They stay out of the smears and sniping. They try to focus on issues and offer real policy proposals. They present themselves as a management team and support each other. Too bad their party gained notoriety as a celebrity vanity project and never built a real grassroots. Otherwise, they might be kicking some serious ass right now. Instead, they have to resort to duck suits just to get the media to cover them.

But at least they're behaving like a party of grown-ups.

If the Kennedy-Kunin Affair shows anything, it's that 24-year-olds understand the Web and most candidates, their advisors, their ad agencies, political reporters and pundits are clueless. But it also shows there's a reason why newspapers are cautious and real journalists identify themselves, ask questions of both sides and have editors look at their work.

Noah Kunin is a bright, idealistic partisan who made one big mistake trying to be an investigative blogger. (Or two, if it turns out his statement wasn't quite the whole story.) But the guy on the other side leading the attack against the amateur Websleuth commits more real damage in a week than Noah will in a lifetime. Behind a veil of compartmentalized "ethics" — I'm a party operative, no, I'm a paid consultant, no, this is all me — Michael Brodkorb chums the political waters by the hour.

And as a result, politics stinks worse and worse.

I want to hear more from the people who would be governing, about how they would govern. I want to hear from the grownups.

Moron or Manipulator?

So Mark Kennedy has taken down his campaign site.

"We were informed last evening of a serious security breach of sensitive Kennedy campaign information by a senior member of Amy Klobuchar’s campaign. Due to the fact this information was accessed via the internet, we are taking precautionary measures to protect our campaign information."

The "breach" occurred at the Web site of his ad agency in Dallas. It's difficult to imagine what sensitive campaign information could be on Kennedy's or any Republican public site, since their approach has been to avoid posting information of use to anyone.

For a stellar example of GOP content richness, see the Pawlenty site.

So the possibilities are:

• This is purely a stunt to try to wring more publicity out of a situation the Klobuchar campaign handled ethically.
• Mark Kennedy hasn't learned much about computers since he presided over a major IT debacle at Dept. 56, when he was still employed there.
• Republicans don't know anything about security, and they cut and run when a blogger says boo!

Ellison Slimed Even in Business Publication.

Keith Ellison is helping expose a particularly ugly streak that is normally veiled by Minnesota Nice (which is really a superficial sweetness covering up bitterness and envy).

You can see it in the exchanges between Rahelio and the anti-Strib sweethearts.

But what a couple extreme-right political bloggers and their readers have to say is less troubling to me than the mindset accompanying the current question by Twin Cities Business Journal:

Do you think Keith Ellison will do a good job representing Minnesota?

Never mind that the readership probably skews Republican, that Ellison's job will be to represent Minnesota's 5th Congressional District or that, as I write this, "No" is polling 2:1 over "Yes." Respondents preferred Pawlenty to Hatch by a similar margin.

No, it's the comments, which show how successful the anti-Ellison propaganda has been.

Keith has proven himself to be untrustworthy and a bully....

...Being a Muslim has absolutely nothing to do with his qualifications and his ability to lead and form coalitions. Rather, what does have a dramatic impact for me is he has shown no ability to take personal responsibility for his actions.....

Being a radical scoflaw is one thing, but the Nation of Islam thing, needs to be really brought to the forefront.... Why isn't the press delving into his background? Afraid of being called bigots, and racists?

No. I don't mind his past as much as I don't like the way he is being SO dihonest about it ever existing.

Regardless of his race or religion, he has not been forthcoming - we need leaders with integrity who stand up for their beliefs and do what they say....

Given the current situation with Extremist Muslims and the hatred/violence they are committing across all races and religions (other than their own) around the world, I DO NOT think we, as AMERICANS, should support someone who considers himself a Muslim.

He seems more oportunist than community servant

Besides the usual Demcratic more government bent we will get less tolerance for our Christian heratige

How can a person who once walked arm-in-arm with Louis Farrakhan, who advocated killing the majority of Minnesotans (i.e. "the White Devil"), properly represent said populace?

He has absolutely no personal integrity and has played dirty race-card politics on the small stage as a Rep. here in the state.

Reading this stuff confirms for me why I should not be making categorical statements about the other side. But it also shows how slime works its way into the general consciousness.