We begin by saying we certainly hope we can live up to such an exuberant headline. You will have to judge for yourself whether all those exclamation points were justified or not.

The real reason for such titular excitement is the convergence of two contests here at Friday Talking Points headquarters. See? I had to restrain myself from typing yet another exclamation point, there.

One contest is over, and we are able to (finally!) crown a winner. And one contest is just beginning, so haul out your crystal ball and peer into the future with us, in the comments.

Last December, we ran a column entitled "Call The Newtsplosion Contest." In it, we used explosive terminology (such as "Newtroglycerine" -- although we have to admit that "Newtonium" and "Newtron Bomb" didn't occur to us until later...) to describe what was likely going to end Newt Gingrich's presidential campaign.

Continue Reading »

We're going to, as Dave Barry likes to say, play "Mister Language Person" today. Mostly because it is so much fun. But we do realize that this is not everyone's cup of tea, so we are being extra polite and warning everyone, up front. Those of you scratching your heads over how an editorial (seemingly-plural) "we" can be said to be a (singular) "Mister," please continue reading (although we're not going to unravel that mystery today, sorry).

We speak today, instead, on the subject of verbizing. Verbizing, for those who have never heard the term, is the process of turning innocent nouns into verbs. This verbizing interlude is brought to you today by the trademark: "Etch A Sketch."

While Mitt Romney will be haunted by this term for the next few months, we're already seeing signs of the next step: verbizing. We even contributed to this trend ourselves yesterday with a parenthetical "Etch A Sketched?" comment.

Continue Reading »

Mitt Romney is now embracing his inner Etch A Sketch, it seems. With the news that even Newt Gingrich has finally decided that the race is over, Mitt now has no real obstacle along his way to securing his party's nomination for president, or to cement his support among Republicans. No real obstacle except himself, of course.

Conventional political wisdom in America dictates that any candidate "tack" to the extreme wing of his party in order to win the primaries, and then "pivot" back to the center in an effort not to seem too extreme to the independent voters which will wind up deciding the race in November. So, Etch A Sketch jokes aside, this was entirely predictable.

But the first issue Romney chose to show a glimmer of independence from Republican orthodoxy is an interesting one, because the deadline for action is right around the corner. Which means it will serve as a very important test for Romney's candidacy as a whole: can Mitt lead his own party -- especially in a direction in which they are not that interested in going?

Continue Reading »

Yesterday, I wrote a column which pointed out that negative campaigning in American politics can be traced back (at the very least) to Andrew Jackson's era. Today's column should be seen as nothing more than a footnote to yesterday's, which was inspired by one of the comments I got on my site yesterday in response. To put it another way, we're going to dive deep into history today, to the election of 1828, so if that sort of thing doesn't interest you, then I'd advise you to spend your time more profitably elsewhere.

Andrew Jackson's first successful run for the presidency has long fascinated historians, because it truly was the beginning of modern party politics in America. All the trappings of campaigns which seem so familiar today (things like campaign buttons or T-shirts or yard signs) all had their roots in the 1820s. Partly, this was due to a historical coincidence (a visit to America by the Revolutionary War hero Lafayette, which had started the craze of personalized scarves and other doodads as souvenirs), and partly it was due to the impressive political machine put together by pro-Jackson newspaper editors and the "Little Magician" (as he was known), Martin Van Buren. Van Buren, if alive today, would doubtlessly be swapping campaign stories on cable television with the likes of Karl Rove and James Carville, who essentially do the same job Van Buren invented during the Jackson campaign. All of which is fascinating, no doubt, but is beside the point I'm trying to make.

Andrew Jackson was ruthlessly and viciously attacked in the opposition newspapers of the day. He was called all sorts of names, and all sorts of evils were laid at his door by editors who most definitely did not want to see him elected.

Jackson, on the other hand, ran as a "man of the people" -- the first to ever do so in American presidential history. He was the original "born in a log cabin" president (a claim made repeatedly thereafter by many contenders for the White House).

Continue Reading »

There's an element to American political campaigns which everyone hates and almost everyone loves to denounce: the negative campaign advertisement. From now until November, many will fulminate against the "coarsening" of our political culture these ads supposedly usher in, and many will call for Mitt Romney and Barack Obama (and all the candidates further down the ballot) to renounce negative campaign advertising -- to absolutely no avail. The mudslinging will continue apace right up until Election Day, for one very simple reason: such ads work. They are effective. Which means -- especially for those living in "battleground" states -- that the only way to avoid the onslaught of political negativity will be to stop watching television altogether, until the election is safely over.

Negative campaigning has been around much longer than even the medium of television, it bears mentioning. Slinging mud at political opponents stretches back to (at the very least) Andrew Jackson's time. It is not, as many myopic political pundits (or even "journalists") would have you believe, some sort of modern invention. Political ads nowadays aren't even particularly more personal or more brutal than what took place back in the 1820s, for that matter. Most of them are quite a bit tamer, in fact.

During his first successful campaign for president, Andrew Jackson's wife was accused of bigamy for marrying him. Jackson himself was painted as a bloodthirsty "military chieftain" who was known for murdering his subordinates, and (in his spare time) fighting "pistols at dawn" duels with private citizens. The Jackson folks countered (falsely) with a story of how John Quincy Adams had "pimped" out "an American virgin" to the Czar, while Adams was America's ambassador to Russia. Can anything said so far (or likely to be said before November) in the current election compare, on the "coarsening of American politics" scale? And this is but one brief example from the history of presidential campaigning -- you really don't have to look very far to find others which are equally as bad. Scathing and scurrilous campaign mud has been routinely slung for roughly two centuries in America, whether anyone in today's media remembers these facts or not.

Continue Reading »

Today is a day two incredibly different groups celebrate. Marijuana enthusiasts, who nationwide adopted a bit of 1970s high school slang from Northern California, are holding various events around the country today, because it is "4/20." Not as well-publicized (by design, for the most part), white supremacists and other hate groups celebrate today as the birthday of Adolph Hitler. The two celebrations and the two groups have nothing in common, I should point out. I'd even bet the overlap between the two groups is almost non-existent.

April 20th is also the day the Columbine shooting happened in Colorado in 1999, but the two shooters may not have picked this day for anything to do with Hitler, they may have been one day late in their plans (April 19th is the anniversary of the fiery end to the Waco siege in 1993, and also of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995). April 20th is also, by coincidence, the same day BP's Deepwater Horizon oil well blew up in the Gulf of Mexico.

What does it all mean in the grand scheme of things? Not a lot, unless you happen to be an astrologist or a numerologist. Or a university administrator trying to stop all the students from blatantly "sparking up" in public, I suppose. Why, you may wonder, am I even bringing up Hitler and explosions and other things that are, like, totally bumming everyone out? Well, because (sadly enough) Hitler's in the news.

The Republicans seem to have chosen Double Down On The Crazy™ as their new campaign motto for 2012. One Senate candidate, in West Virginia, says new anti-smoking regulations are pretty much the same thing as that time when Hitler made all the Jews in Germany wear yellow Stars of David. Unfortunately, I am not making this up.

Continue Reading »

[Program Note: There's really not much to say about the Secret Service's prostitution scandal that hasn't already been said. In fact, I've already weighed in on the bigger picture myself, four years ago, when Eliot Spitzer made the news as "Client Number Nine." So I thought it'd be a good day to dig this out of the archives and run it again. It was originally written with politicians in mind, but expanding the project to cover the Secret Service really wouldn't be all that big a stretch....]

Continue Reading »

That title was long enough, but it really should have also had "by Grace Slick" at the end of it. Because she is the budgetary and political genius I'm basing this column on (and no, I'm not kidding). I also should warn, up front (for those considering fleeing for the exits already), that I'm not even going to talk about deficits, which is a somewhat separate problem. So all you folks ready to pen "But what about the deficits?" comments, be warned that I'm not even going to address that problem herein.

OK, anyone still left reading? Here we go. Every year, Congress is supposed to pass a federal budget. This budget "pie" is sliced up between all the different federal agencies, for all the things the federal government does. The House of Representatives and the Senate (and the politicians within), haggle and struggle over what dollars should go where.

I saw a headline in my newspaper this morning which exemplifies this fight: "House Republicans consider reductions in food stamps to save military spending." This is actually a very old argument, and used to (in post-WWII times) be framed as: "guns or butter." Spending on social problems like feeding the hungry versus funding the military-industrial complex -- a clear choice. While this is merely the most stark choice in the budgetary fighting, such decisions are the heart of the battle -- weighing one program or agency against another, and deciding how much money each will get.

This is where Grace Slick comes in, because while I've also been a believer of this plan, she states it better than I could, from her autobiography Somebody to Love?

Continue Reading »

The United States government (the FCC, in particular) has just levied a fine on Google, for breaching the privacy of people's emails and other sensitive data. That sounds like a good thing, right? A corporation does something stupid and quite possibly illegal, and they are punished for doing so.

The problem? The fine was $25,000.

Now, that may sound like a lot of money to you. Twenty-five grand ain't peanuts, in other words. Until you compare it to the size of Google itself.

Last quarter, Google made $2.9 billion in profit (not gross earnings, but actual profit). If they keep this pace up all year, they will earn $11.6 billion for the year. Good for them, and good for their stockholders.

But it does put it the fine in a different light. Here are Google's possible earnings this year, followed by the fine just levied upon them:

Continue Reading »

As we enter the general election season, the political punditry will (once again) trot out many shallow and trite phrases and concepts to be consumed as easily-digestible mental pap for their audiences. It is, after all the silly season. I don't even exclude myself -- I'll probably oversimplify a few things from now until Election Day, if the past is any prologue. But I just wanted to address the worst of these inane and facile statements right here at the beginning of the race: the false dichotomy that "this election will either be a choice or a referendum." Mostly because I'm already sick of hearing such tripe, and it is only April.

In case you've just returned from an expedition to Mars, and haven't heard this formulaic nonsense before, allow me to explain what it is supposed to mean. A "referendum" election means that the voters -- en masse -- will decide that it doesn't matter who the Republican candidate is, they will be voting solely on how they feel Barack Obama has done in his first term. A "choice" election means that voters -- again, as a monolithic group -- will contemplate the two major-party nominees and decide which of them would be the better president. Using this "logic," the Republicans hope it'll be a referendum, and the White House hopes it will be a choice.

The fact that this is a distinction without a difference has escaped pretty much anyone who ever uses this construct. It is the very definition of a false dichotomy -- a division into two mutually-exclusive groups, when no such division actually exists.

Now, it is basic human nature to invent such divisions. I've always maintained that there are two types of people in this world: those who divide the people in this world into two groups, and those who do not. [OK, sorry, I apologize for that... but I just couldn't resist.]

Continue Reading »