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Well known is music’s power to stir emotions; less well known is that the stirring of specific emotions can result from the use of very simple yet still characteristic music. Consider the music that accompanies this sweet, sorrowful conclusion of pop culture’s latest cinematic saga.

When the on-set footage begins, so does some soft music that is rather uncomplicated because, in part, it simply alternates between two chords which last about four seconds each. These two chords are shown on the keyboard below. In classical as well as pop music, these two chords typically do not alternate with one another like this. Although the music for this featurette eventually makes room for other chords, the musical message of the more distinctive opening has clearly been sent, and it apparently worked on this blogger, who admits to shedding a few tears and recommends the viewer have a tissue nearby.

This simple progression has been used to accompany loss-induced sadness in numerous mainstream (mostly Hollywood) cinematic scenes for nearly 30 years. This association is not simply confined to movies, yet inhabits a larger media universe. For example, while the pop song “Comeback Story” by Kings of Leon, which opens this movie’s trailer, helps to convey the genre of the advertised product, the same two-chord progression—let’s call it the “loss gesture”—highlights the establishing narrative: a patriarchal death has brought a mourning family together (for comedic and sentimental results).

Loss gestures can play upon one’s heartstrings less discriminately; they can elicit both tears of joy as well as tears of sadness. Climaxes in Dreamer and Invincible, both underdog-comes-from-behind movies, are punctuated with loss gestures. As demonstrated at 2:06 in the following video, someone employed by the Republican Party appears to be keenly aware of this simple progression’s powerful capacity for moving a viewer (and potential voter).

Within the universe of contemporary media, the loss gesture has been used in radio as well. The interlude music that plays before or after a story on National Public Radio often has some relation to the content of the story. A week after the Sandy Hook school shootings, NPR aired a story by Kirk Siegler entitled “Newtown Copes With Grief, Searches For Answers.” Immediately after the story’s poignant but hopeful ending, the opening of Dustin O’Halloran’s “Opus 14” faded in, musically encapsulating the emotions of the moment.

How the loss gesture works its magic on listeners is a Gordian knot. However, it is undeniable that producers from several different corners of the media world know that the loss gesture works.

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Every year, one member of the recently criticized White House press corps writes a holiday poem for its annual party.

USA Today reports that SRN News radio correspondent Greg Clugston wrote the poem this year.

The piece made references to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney‘s slight against Big Bird and actor Clint Eastwood‘s infamous conversation with an empty chair. Here’s an excerpt:

“Republicans eyed victory — there was change in the air,
In Tampa, Clint Eastwood conversed with a chair.
Romney rose in the polls and enjoyed his ascent,
But, oh, how he stumbled with “47 percent.”

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Journalists Mark Halperin and John Heilemann will once again be teaming up on a new nonfiction project. Following the success of their 2010 title, Game Change, the writing duo plans to pen Double Down: Game Change 2012.

This book will examine Presidential race between President Barack Obama and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. Penguin Press president and editor-in-chief Ann Godoff negotiated the deal with The Wylie Agency’s Andrew Wylie. According to The New York Times, the publisher has planned a release date for fall 2013.

Here’s more from The Hollywood Reporter: “The book already has been optioned by HBO. The cable network aired Game Change, a Jay Roach-directed and Danny Strong-written movie about the 2008 election that in September won four Emmys, including one for Julianne Moore‘s performance as Sarah Palin. Roach and Strong are likely to return for the sequel.”

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The real number to be watching today is Nate Silver’s Amazon book ranking.

— Rex Sorgatz (@fimoculous) November 6, 2012

FiveThirtyEight blogger and author Nate Silver gave Mitt Romney an eight percent chance of winning the election today.

He wrote:  ”I hope you’ll excuse the cliché, but it’s appropriate here: in poker, making an inside straight requires you to catch one of 4 cards out of 48 remaining in the deck, the chances of which are about 8 percent. Those are now about Mr. Romney’s chances of winning the Electoral College, according to the FiveThirtyEight forecast. As any poker player knows, those 8 percent chances do come up once in a while.”

In recent weeks, Silver has defended his statistical methods against all sorts of attacks, and his book has spent 50 days in the Amazon Top 100 of all books. Writer Rex Sorgatz made an interesting point this morning. Silver is staking his reputation as a blogger and an author on this election, and Sorgatz thinks ”the real number to be watching today is Nate Silver’s Amazon book ranking.”

continued…

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By Elvin Lim

The Republicans’ convention bump for Mitt Romney appears to be muted. Why? There was a lot of bad luck. Holding the convention before the Labor Day weekend caused television viewership to go down by 30 percent, as did the competing and distracting news about Hurricane Isaac. The Clint Eastwood invisible chair wasn’t a disaster, but a wasted opportunity that Romney’s advisors should have vetted. Valuable time that could have been spent promoting Romney (such as the video of him that had to be played earlier) before he came out to speak on prime time, was instead spent in a meandering critique of Obama.

Obama’s first remarks about the convention was that it was something you would see on a black-and-white tv — a new spin on the Republican Party as allegedly backward, as opposed to the Democrat’s who lean “Forward.”

The most revealing thing about the convention was that President George W. Bush wasn’t asked to speak. Instead, he appeared in a video with the older Bush, possibly in a bid to mollify the presence of the younger. Republicans are still divided over Bush, which is why they continued their hagiography of Reagan in the convention. For all of Jeb Bush’s intonations for the Obama campaign to stop putting blame on the previous administration, the fact is that the convention conceded that George W. Bush was indeed a liability. “Forward” is a narrative that can work as long as the look immediately backwards isn’t too satisfying.

On the other side, Bill Clinton will of course make an appearance in Charlotte in next week. The Democrats have also wisely flooded the speakers’ list with women, to show that the Republicans’ paltry presentation of just five women represent the tokenism narrative that Democrats are trying to paint. Women are America’s numerically biggest demographic and they are more likely to turn out than men (by 4% in 2008).

In this final stretch, the gurus are gunning straight for the demographics. Campaigning has become a science, albeit an imperfect one. The Romney campaign now knows that a generic refutation of the Obama’s performance about the economy, jobs, the national debt — which we’ve been hearing for nearly four years — is not going to change the underlying tectonics of voter sentiment. This is why they tried to elevate the Medicare issue last week, and why they’re trying the personalize Romney strategy this week. The latter is more likely to work, and it should be done quickly, because next week, the DNC intends to make America fall in love with Barack Obama again.

Elvin Lim is Associate Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-Intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com and his column on politics appears on the OUPblog regularly.

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By Edward Zelinsky

By selecting Representative Paul Ryan as the Republican vice presidential nominee, Romney confirmed the decline of the traditional role of vice presidential candidates as providers of geographic balance. Ryan’s selection reinforces the shift to a more policy-oriented definition of the vice presidency. This shift reflects the nationalization of our culture and politics and the increased importance of the general election debate between vice presidential candidates.

Traditionally, a vice presidential candidate usually came from a large swing state in a section of the country removed from the presidential candidate’s home state. The classic (and most successful) instance of this once conventional pattern was John Kennedy’s selection in 1960 of Lyndon Johnson as Kennedy’s running mate. Johnson was picked to deliver the electoral votes of Texas and other southern states to a ticket headed by a candidate from Massachusetts. It worked.

A generation later, another Democratic presidential nominee from Massachusetts, Michael Dukakis, emulated Kennedy by selecting as his vice presidential nominee Texas Senator Lloyd Bentsen. This time it didn’t work, but the Dukakis-Bentsen ticket fell well within the tradition of geographic balancing.

The new, policy-oriented pattern commenced in the next election in 1992 when Bill Clinton of Arkansas named as his running mate the senator from next door, Tennessee’s Al Gore. In terms of geographic balance, a Clinton-Gore ticket made no sense — two southerners from neighboring states.

Clinton saw the role of the vice president differently. Gore possessed Washington experience and connections Clinton lacked. Gore thus provided, not geographic balance, but national experience and expertise. This departure from traditional geographic ticket balancing worked for the Democrats both in 1992 and in 1996.

When it was Gore’s turn to choose a running mate in 2000, Gore too departed from tradition, turning to Connecticut’s junior senator, Joe Lieberman. True, Lieberman came from a northern state, Connecticut. But the Nutmeg State, then with eight electoral votes, was not a great electoral prize nor was it in serious doubt for the Democratic ticket. Gore turned to Lieberman because the ethically-challenged image of the Clinton Administration was a problem for Gore. Lieberman’s reputation for ethical probity provided useful ballast to the Democratic ticket.

But it was the Bush-Cheney ticket in 2000 which truly broke the geographic balancing mold. Bush did not pick Cheney for the vice presidency to secure Wyoming’s three electoral votes. Rather, the Texas Governor selected Cheney to bring to the ticket Cheney’s perceived gravitas including his experience as Wyoming’s congressman, Secretary of Defense, and White House Chief of Staff.

By 2008, it was no longer innovative when Barack Obama selected Joseph Biden of Delaware as his vice presidential running mate. Biden was not placed on the ticket to secure Delaware’s three electoral votes or otherwise secure geographic balance. Like Gore and Cheney, Biden was perceived as a Washington insider and policy expert. Biden’s experience augmented a ticked headed by a presidential candidate whose tenure in the nation’s capital consisted of a single, not-yet-completed term in the US Senate.

Ryan fits comfortably within the newer, policy-oriented vision of the vice presidency. It doesn’t hurt that Ryan comes from Wisconsin, a state the Republicans are eager to put into play. But unlike some of the other individuals Romney considered for the vice presidential nomination (such as Senator Portman of Ohio or Senator Rubio of Florida), Ryan doesn’t come from a major swing state. Indeed, Ryan himself has never run for statewide office in Wisconsin.

Ryan was picked because he is a young, articulate conservative policy wonk. Romney chose Ryan because of Ryan’s ideas, not Ryan’s home state.

What has caused this evolution of the vice presidency? A key factor is the nationalization of our culture and our politics. Kennedy and Johnson (as well as Dukakis and Bentsen) were individuals deeply rooted in their respective home states. We have become a more mobile nation. Barack Obama (born and raised in Hawaii, educated in California, New York, and Massachusetts) was a senator from Illinois. But his biography is itself a story of geographic balance.

The same is true of Mitt Romney, born and raised in Michigan, educated in California, Utah, and Massachusetts. Romney’s business career occurred in Massachusetts as did his one term as the Bay State’s governor. But no one even expects Romney to carry Massachusetts in November.

Just as the life stories of the presidential candidates are no longer centered in their “home” states, the electorate reflects America’s mobility as a nation. Consequently, geographic ties mean less today than they did in the past; roughly 40% of Americans today live in a different state than the state in which they were born.

Moreover, modern communications instantly nationalize our political figures. Paul Ryan will soon be as well-known in Texas as he is in Wisconsin. In this world of mobility and instant national communications, geographic ticket-balancing is less compelling than it was in the past.

A second factor buttressing the evolution of the vice presidency is the emergence of the vice presidential debates. When Kennedy and Nixon conducted the first presidential debates in 1960, there was no vice presidential debate between Johnson and the Republican nominee, Henry Cabot Lodge.

Today, the vice presidential debate is an important event on the campaign calendar. In picking a running mate, a presidential candidate must consider this event. My son Aaron and his colleagues at the Presidential Debate Blog correctly observe that Senator Bentsen uttered the most famous line in presidential debating: “Senator, you are no Jack Kennedy.” However, debate skills don’t always correspond with geographic balance. Ryan was in large measure selected because of his ability to go toe-to-toe, rhetorically and intellectually, with Vice President Biden.

We will, no doubt, some day again see a presidential candidate select his or her vice presidential running mate from a large swing state in a section of the country far from the presidential candidate’s home state. But that geographic balancing mold is now longer dominant.

Edward A. Zelinsky is the Morris and Annie Trachman Professor of Law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law of Yeshiva University. He is the author of The Origins of the Ownership Society: How The Defined Contribution Paradigm Changed America. His column ‘EZ Thoughts’ appears on the OUPblog monthly.

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Image credit: Seal of the Vice President of the United States. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

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Oxford University Press USA is putting together a series of articles on a political topic each week for four weeks as the United States discusses the upcoming American presidential election, and Republican and Democratic National Conventions. Our scholars previously tackled the issues of money and politics, and the role of political conventions. This week we turn to the role of media in politics.

By Daniel Kreiss

A recent Pew study on the presidential candidates’ use of social media described Barack Obama as having a “substantial lead” over Mitt Romney. The metrics for the study were the amounts of content these candidates post, the number of platforms the campaigns are active on, and the differential responses of the public.

Metrics such as these often tell us very little about how campaigns are actually using social media and the Internet more generally, and their relative strategies for and success in doing so. If there is anything that I found in my last six years of researching new media and electoral campaigns, it is that much of what makes for the successful uptake of new media is often the organizational decisions that receive scant scholarly and journalistic attention. A focus on platforms and content tells us little about the issues of campaign organization, staffing, and coordination of digital and field efforts around electoral strategy that have much more impact on electoral success.

For one, both the Obama and Romney campaigns have created organizational structures that make the heads of their respective new media teams senior leadership. The Romney campaign learned this by studying Obama’s 2008 campaign, which was among the first efforts to organize a campaign in this way.

This organizational role, in turn, helps integrate new media operations within the larger electoral strategy of the campaign. This is important because effective campaigns take up new media in accordance with their electoral goals, and investments in new media have to be evaluated in light of overall campaign strategy. There are very real differences between the presidential candidates, their parties, their supporter and donor bases, and electoral strategies — so much so that we should not expect them to have the same goals for, strategies of using, and investments in their use of new and social media.

During the 2008 cycle, for example, the Obama team took to new media early on, with the specific goal of using an array of tools to overcome the institutional advantages of Senator Hillary Clinton. For the campaign, this meant using new media as a fundraising and especially organizing tool in accordance with the larger electoral goal of expanding the electorate among groups favorable to Obama with historically low rates of turnout: youth and African Americans. Above all, it meant using new media to translate the incredible energy of supporters gathering around the candidate into resources that campaigns need: money, message, volunteers, and ultimately, votes. And yet, while this worked for Obama, other candidates with essentially the same tools could not inspire the same supporter mobilization. The story of the 2008 Obama campaign is neatly summed up in what Michael Slaby, the 2008 campaign’s chief technology officer and the 2012 campaign’s chief integration and innovation officer, said to me: “We didn’t have to generate desire very often. We had to capture and empower interest and desire…. We made intelligent decisions that kept it growing but I don’t think anybody can really claim we started something.”

In this light, the continual hope, exemplified in the Pew Study, for “transforming campaigning into something more dynamic, more of a dialogue,” and the inevitable let down when this does not occur, is a case of our democratic aspirations placing undo expectations on campaigns. Campaigns have very concrete metrics for success given electoral institutions. Campaigns are temporal entities with defined goals: garnering the resources and ultimately the votes necessary to win elections. They are not about democratic renewal, although certainly that can happen. Furthermore, much of the discourse calling for dialogue ignores a fundamental fact: the goals of campaigns and their supporters on social media are often closely aligned around defeating opponents. Supporters embrace tasks and respond to one-way messaging because their goal is to win on election day, not remake democratic processes.

Indeed, a close look at the networked tools campaigns across the aisle are now routinely using in 2012 reveals an emphasis on electoral gain, and integrating tools within larger electoral strategy. The story of the last decade in electoral campaigning has been both about a reinvestment in old fashioned, shoe leather campaigning coupled with new data infrastructures designed to more efficiently and effectively coordinate volunteers and leverage their time, efforts, and social networks. As Rasmus Nielsen has analyzed in his recent book, in the face of widespread practitioner recognition of the diminishing returns of broadcast television ads, fragmented audiences, narrowly decided contests, and social science findings, campaigns have increasingly enlisted humans as media through what he calls “personalized political communication.” Campaigns deploy field volunteers on the basis of voter modeling and targeting supported by a vast, national data infrastructure stitched together from a host of public (voter registration, turnout, and real estate records), commercial (credit card information, magazine subscription lists), party (historical canvass data), and increasingly social network data.

Leveraging people as media in the field complements the ways in which campaigns enlist supporters as the conduits of strategic communications to their strong and weak ties online. Campaigns seek to utilize the social affordances of platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to create what I call new “digital two step flows” of political communication, where official campaign content circulates virally through networks of supporters. On one level, geographic-based volunteering in supporters’ communities is now supported by networked devices, such as the Obama Dashboard volunteer platform that creates teams based on location, and mobile apps that display local voter contact targets and scripts for contacting them. On another, through networked media far-flung affinity, professional, and social ties can now serve as channels of political communication designed to mobilize donors and online volunteers. Campaigns believe that political communication coming from supporters contacting voters through their geographic and social networks is more persuasive.

Alongside the fashioning of supporters into media and their social networks into channels, campaigns have developed sophisticated “computational management” practices that leverage media as internal and external coordination devices. New media is a closed loop; every expenditure can be tracked in terms of its return on investment given the ability to generate real time results of supporters’ interactions with networked media. If creating digital two step flows remains more art than science as campaigns struggle to make content go viral, optimizing web content and online advertising is data-driven to probabilistically increase the likelihood that supporters will take the actions campaigns want them to. Optimization is based around continually running experimental trials of web content and design in order to probabilistically increase the likelihood of desired outcomes. This means campaigns vary the format, colors, content, shapes, images, and videos of a whole range of email and website content based on the characteristics of particular users to find what is most optimal for increasing returns. In 2008, for example, the Obama campaign created over 2,000 different versions of its contribution page, and across the campaign optimization accounted for $57 million dollars, which essentially paid for the campaign’s general election budgets in Florida and Ohio.

At the same time, while television advertising has dominated campaign expenditures for much of the last half century, campaigns are increasingly investing in online advertising, which is premised on being able to access new sources of behavioral, demographic, and affinity data that allows for the more sophisticated targeting and tailoring of political messages. Campaigns can match online IP addresses with party voter files, allowing them to target priority voters. Campaigns use this matching, along with behavioral, demographic, interest, and look-alike targeting (matching voters based on the characteristics they share with others with known political preferences), to deliver online ads for the purposes of list-building, mobilizing supporters to get involved, and persuading undecideds.

Despite the best attempts of staffers, campaigns remain messy, complicated affairs. While it would be easy to see things such as computational management and online advertising in Orwellian terms, the reality is that campaigns are continually creating and appropriating new tools and platforms because their control over the electorate is limited. Candidates still contend with intermediaries in the press, opponents engaging in their own strategic communications, and voters who have limited attention spans, social attachments, and partisan affiliations that mitigate the effects of even the most finely tailored advertising. Millions, meanwhile, refuse to engage in the process, a massive silent minority that campaigns only spend significant resources on if they have them. There must always be political desire that exists prior to any of these targeted communications practices, or else supporters and voters will tune them out like much else that is peripheral to their core concerns.

In the end, as another presidential general election takes shape, we see continuities in electoral politics in the face of considerable technological change.

Daniel Kreiss is Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Kreiss’s research explores the impact of technological change on the public sphere and political practice. In Taking Our Country Back: The Crafting of Networked Politics from Howard Dean to Barack Obama (Oxford University Press, 2012), Kreiss presents the history of new media and Democratic Party political campaigning over the last decade. Kreiss is an affiliated fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School and received a Ph.D. in Communication from Stanford University. Kreiss’s work has appeared in New Media and Society, Critical Studies in Media Communication, The Journal of Information Technology and Politics, and The International Journal of Communication, in addition to other academic journals. You can find out more about Kreiss’s research at http://danielkreiss.com or follow him on Twitter at @kreissdaniel

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The inevitable U. S. election season mash-up:

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Cartoon Brew | Permalink | 8 comments | Post tags: Mitt Romney, ParaMormon

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Let’s first consider the historical setting, as any writer who wishes to make a decisive introduction to retrospective comparison should consider. In 1773 the English Parliament passed a tea act, taxing colonial merchants; and in doing so outraged the Colonists and united them in opposition. When the first small cargoes of tea consigned to Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston were not allowed to be unloaded, it was a shock to England. The tax was to be enforced and paid by midnight of December 16th. The reaction was swift and nonviolent. The English put up no resistance and the ships were not damaged.

The Colonists, disguised as Indians, boarded the tea ships in Boston the night of December 16, 1773 and dumped the cargoes into the water. The captain’s log book, dated Thursday, December 16, 1773 stated:

Between six and seven o’clock this evening, came down to the wharf a body of about one thousand people, among them were a number dressed and whooping like Indians. They came on board the ship, and after warning myself and the customs-house officers to get out of the way, they undid the hatches and went down the hood, where was eighty whole, and thirty-four half chests of tea, which they hoisted upon deck, and cut the chests to pieces, hove the tea overboard, where it was damaged and lost.

The event was publicized as “the destruction of the tea” but was not recorded as the “Boston Tea Party” until the mid-30s, around 1834/5, when the new moniker was born, for opposing oppressive government control.

The tea party of 1773 united all of the Colonists under a moniker surviving today. Whether protesting as tea party members, as patriots, as occupiers, the opposition and clamor to correct abuses is louder than ever. It gives us our Republic and a Republican form of government.

The Republic is a renovation of the natural order of things, a system of principles as universal as truth and the existence of man, and combed moral with political happiness and national prosperity. It is the natural order to preserve liberty, property, and security as guaranteed rights of man. It extends the sovereignty of such rights into the political associations which comprise the nation and demands that such associations, whether individual, or as a body of men are only entitled to that authority which is expressly derived from the people.

What is called the Republic is not any particular form of government like democratic, aristocratic, or monarchy. It is wholly characteristic of the matter or object for which government ought to be instituted, and to which it is to be employed— A REPUBLIC, the public affairs, or the public good; or, literally translated, the public thing.

It is a word of a good original, referring to what ought to be the character and business of government; and in this sense it is naturally opposed to the word monarchy which encompasses arbitrary power vested in an individual person, the exercise of which is the person, and not the republic.

The REPUBLIC, public thing has as its origin the Greek “Democracy”; however, there are many strong limitations in the Democratic form of government. It ultimately leads to the failure of a true Democracy in guaranteeing the innate rights of man.The true distinction between a Republic and a Democracy is that in the Democracy the people meet and exercise the government in person. In a Republic, they assemble and administer it by their representatives.

Democracy will, by necessity, be confined to a small spot. A Republic may be extended over a large region. Mitt Romney’s negative ad attacks on the Obama presidency and healthcare reform are an example of this kind of modern comparison.

Democracy works well as a form of government where limited in scope of size and population it can conduct the REPUBLIC or the public business of a nation until, however, it becomes too extensive and populous. Democracy cannot work effectively as the separate parts soon become oppressive once becoming powerful.

Space and size quickly destroy the effectiveness of Democracy. Ancient Greece discovered this quickly as power shifted from Athens, and the demand for centralized power in the government arose out of strength, not voice. Under a Republic, the public voice, as pronounced by the representatives of the people, is more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves.

Our Tea Party fought not so much for sovereignty, but for the public voice to be heard by abusive powers. Their voice, being unheard, soon results in a voice demanding to be heard. They wanted representation then, most of all. And when denied, the very voice which believed in natural law, gave birth to a new nation and a new form of government: the Republican Form.

This startled the world juxtaposing a new voice within a Democracy. A people’s voice creating a Republican form of government: a government established and conducted for the interest of the public, as well individually as collectively. It did not connect with any particular form which the world understands.

It defies being subservient to another power and declares itself sovereign by divine right and by voice. And that voice declares itself by representation.Adding representation upon Democracy creates a system of government which embraces and brings together all the various interests and every extent of territory and population known.

The Republican form of government immediately concentrates the knowledge necessary to the interests of the parts and of the whole. The whole is now the nation, the parts are states, the people are also parts of the whole, yet their collective voices, by representation, become the whole.For once, government can be seen as the child of the voice of the people who created it. Every man is a proprietor in government, and has the duty to consider it a necessary part of his business to understand. The Republic concerns his interest, because it affects his property, his life, and his pursuit of happiness.And these interests have costs which derive themselves from all men being created equal.You can examine the cost and compare it with the individual or collective advantages. And your voice, alone must represent your examination before all others.

With the advent of a Constitution enumerating what you grant, you do not have to adopt the slavish custom of following what in other governments are called leaders.

As Benjamin Franklin quickly noted when asked what kind of government is formed, he answered prophetically: “A Republic, if you can keep it.”

It is not easy to preserve and keep a Republic once it begins to fall away. The heart of the republic is the voice of the people and the voice of the people is expressed through its mandated representation.

How often have you heard representatives say, I voted for the “good of the country”, or for the “good of the party”, when the voice going unheard is the voice of representation which says… vote for the good of the republic within the district you represent?

Representation must represent only those constituents who exercised the sovereign right to put them in power and position to represent.

Your Congress represents elected officials representative of a part of a whole. They are not the whole, nor can they represent the nation without consent from the majority of the other parts which form that whole. The whole is the nation; however, the voice of the nation is the people collectively expressing themselves through individual representatives.

A nation is not the body, the figure of which is to be represented by the human body; but is like a body contained within a circle, having a common center, in which every radius meets; and that center is formed by representation. The representatives, too, represent themselves only as a part of their very constituency and are one voice within their collective membership when in Congress Assembled. There can be no vote taken by them for the “good of the country”.

As representatives sitting in the federal government, the “good of the country” only occurs concomitantly with the consent of the rest of the nation.What is government but more than the management of the affairs of a Nation? It is not, and from its nature cannot be, the property of any particular man or family, but of the whole community, at whose expense it is supported; and through by force and contrivance it has been usurped into an inheritance, the usurpation cannot alter the right of thing.

Sovereignty, as a matter of right, appertains to the Nation only, and not any individual; and a Nation has at all times an inherent indefeasible right to abolish any form of government it finds inconvenient, and to establish such as accords with its interest, disposition and happiness. Every citizen is a member of the collective sovereignty; and as such, can acknowledge no personal subjection – his obedience can be only to the Common Laws.

As members of the national government, the good of the country is only that under powers given by citizens, and granted to the national government, such as the management of foreign affairs wherein the states waive all rights to make a treaty, enter into an alliance, receive a foreign ambassador, or deal in any way with a foreign government.

The balance of power, conversely, and ultimately, flows from the bottom up rather than from the internationally recognized top down. Such principles of Declaration are the truths to restore our Republic. They are reserved in the declarations made by the Tea Party forefathers. What have we learned?

That man has rights, — life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. This is the legacy left us. The ideal of individual liberty, that an individual has certain fundamental and inalienable rights which municipal, state or federal government can never override without permission.Governments exist for the benefit of the governed to secure and protect those rights of man. Government is FOR the people.

And that these governments “derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Government is OF the people and BY their consent. Whenever any government usurps power and becomes destructive of the rights of man, then it is the right of the people to overthrow that government, and when necessary to do so, it is also the right and duty of the people to establish a new government on whatever principles and in whatever form will insure to them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

That under law and government, and in the protection of the rights of the people “all men are created equal” and must be allowed the fullest and freest exercise and development of their natural powers.

And that these governments“derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.”Government is OF the people and BY their consent.

Whenever any government usurps power and becomes destructive of the rights of man, then it is the right of the people to overthrow that government, and when necessary to do so, it is also the right and duty of the people to establish a new government on whatever principles and in whatever form will insure to them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

That under law and government, and in the protection of the rights of the people “all men are created equal” and must be allowed the fullest and freest exercise and development of their natural powers.

And to do so, our forefathers decreed: “there shall be freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of peaceable assembly, freedom of petition. The homes of the people shall be secure against search, seizure, or intrusion, except by legal process. No person shall be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb for the same offense, nor shall any person be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.”

Continuing, “no bill of attainder or ex post facto law shall be passed. The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it, but any one accused of crime shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime may have been committed. He shall not be arrested except by legal process; he shall be informed of the exact nature of the accusation; he shall be confronted by the witnesses against him, and shall not be compelled to testify against himself.”

Some of those who represent us now in Congress Assembled are ineligible to represent us and have lost their citizenship.

Do you know the ORIGINAL THIRTEENTH AMENDMENT was passed in support of Article I, Section 9, of the United States Constitution?

“No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the consent of Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”

Said original Amendment is a matter of record notwithstanding it being continuously omitted in reproduction as it clearly provides the penalty for enforcement of Article 1, Section 9.

 The ORIGINAL THIRTEENTH AMENDMENT

Passed by Congress February 1, l865“If any citizen of the United States shall accept, claim, receive, or retain any title of nobility or honor, or shall, without the consent of Congress, accept and retain any present, pension, office, or emolument of any kind whatsoever, from any Emperor, King, Prince, or Foreign Power, such person shall cease to be a citizen of the United States, and shall be incapable of holding any office of trust or profit under them, or either of them.”Is it any wonder, then, that the following two questions might just be answered with an emphatic: NO!

Can any attorney taking oath to any Bar association which pledges itself to the Crown of England still be a citizen?

Can any Congressman, in the House or Senate, accepting financial support from corporations or lobbyists outside their constituency and venue still be a citizen?

Thus, it is time again to restore America to its rightful place in history as that nation which first introduced the Rights of Man as being the grantor of power and privileges to uphold and defend its rights.

To do this, the Republic needs the voice of the people once more. We need to speak again as in 1773 where the real intent of the Boston Tea Party was not to just dump tea in protest of taxation. It was to demand representation and voice. Again, today, We the people, need to speak.It is our duty. Our rugged Constitution clearly gives us the Right to speak within our Bill of Rights with no less than six specifically identified amendments.

THE CONSTITUTIONAL VOICES

The only lawful constituent voices are those who can delegate representation in municipal, State or Congressional districts, and are limited to:

CITIZENS, who have been identified and are registered with district rights to vote for representation at municipal, State, or federal levels.

CORPORATIONS (like Mitt Romney‘s Bain Capital) which have only recently been identified by the U.S. Supreme Court as being persons.

Under Article XIV, Section 1, and having corporate headquarters in a specific Congressional district, they may lobby (one vote) only in their district for representation at municipal, State, or federal levels.We need now reformation of the process of creating and submitting bills for consideration and ratification. The following procedures are suggestive ballot measures to be sent via e-mail, blog, or what have you, to your representative or as a ballot measure for submission to voters on the next ballot to bring back the voice of America for the benefit of its people.

Book publisher and Self Publishing Information provided by S&D book publishers and christian book publishers as a courtesy.

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Comic book writer Chuck Dixon, whose resume includes co-creating the Batman villain Bane (as well as a whole slew of other characters), refuted conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh‘s conspiracy theory that Bane represents Mitt Romney.

Dixon told ComicBook.com: ”The idea that there’s some kind of liberal agenda behind the use of Bane in the new movie is silly. I refuted this within hours of the article in the Washington Examiner suggesting that Bane would be tied to Bain Capital and Mitt Romney appearing. Bane was created by me and Graham Nolan and we are lifelong conservatives and as far from left-wing mouthpieces as you are likely to find in comics.”

Dixon said that the he did not have politics in mind when he created the character, but said that he would be more of an “Occupy Wall Street type,” if he were to be compared to a modern day political figure.

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If you’re trying to understand the 2012 US Presidential elections, here it is in cartoon terms: Barack Obama is Bugs Bunny, Mitt Romney is Daffy Duck. I’m voting for Porky Pig.

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Cartoon Brew | Permalink | One comment | Post tags: Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, Warner Bros.

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In an expletive filled essay at The Daily Beast, novelist Stephen King warned wealthy Americans to pay their “fair share” of taxes before civil unrest deepens in the United States.

Do you agree with King’s bombastic essay? His essay also took aim at Presidential candidate, author and fellow wealthy person Mitt Romney. Check it out:

Mitt Romney has said, in effect, “I’m rich and I don’t apologize for it.” Nobody wants you to, Mitt. What some of us want—those who aren’t blinded by a lot of bullsh** persiflage thrown up to mask the idea that rich folks want to keep their damn money—is for you to acknowledge that you couldn’t have made it in America without America. That you were fortunate enough to be born in a country where upward mobility is possible (a subject upon which Barack Obama can speak with the authority of experience), but where the channels making such upward mobility possible are being increasingly clogged. That it’s not fair to ask the middle class to assume a disproportionate amount of the tax burden. Not fair? It’s un-fu**ing-American is what it is. I don’t want you to apologize for being rich; I want you to acknowledge that in America, we all should have to pay our fair share.

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Bernie Krause's "The Great Animal Orchestra" catalogs and celebrates the sounds of the world's truly wild places.

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It’s easy to understand misogynist Republican men if you view them in the context of the animal kingdom. Males, from fruit flies to men, have an anatomical limitation. They cannot produce eggs, and if they’re mammals like us, they cannot get pregnant or give birth. Their only contribution to reproduction is sperm. And sperm must leave a male’s body in order to fertilize an egg. This means that in the act of mating, males lose control of their most precious biological possession, their sperm. Once sperm leave a male’s body, they are under the control of the female. She can eject them, kill them, block them or allow them to fertilize her eggs. Females are scary creatures!

Among waterfowl, where rape is common, females have evolved vaginas with dead-end sacs, a kind of internal burial ground for an unwanted male’s sperm.
The only way males can try to control their sperm investment is by controlling the recipients—females! And males—insects to humans—do anything and everything they can to exert control and subvert female choice. (Of course there are many wonderful liberated men who think with their brains instead of the instrument below their belt, but those who want to make women’s bodies property of the state are not among them.)

Subversion tactics are seen most clearly in insects. Female insects mate with several males and store sperm in their sperm-storage chamber. Scientists have discovered that female choice goes on internally in the female’s reproductive tract. It is within the changing climate of this internal environment that hidden or “cryptic” female choice takes place, perhaps at the level of the ovum itself, in determining which sperm of which male, if any, will be allowed to penetrate the egg’s membrane to achieve fertilization. Such internal female choice may be going on in women, too!

So males across species engage in sperm competition and mate guarding to ensure that only their sperm fertilize their mate’s eggs and sire her offspring. Among insects, some bizarre tactics for ensuring confidence of paternity have evolved.

One tactic is the copulatory plug, a gluey substance secreted by the male to block the female’s genital opening, preventing a rival’s sperm from getting inside. The male damselfly has a kind of scooper on the end of his penis that he uses to scoop out previously deposited sperm before mating with a female. Some male fruit flies inject toxic semen, which thwarts rivals but also hastens the female’s death.

Men don’t use genital glue or sperm scoopers but they do use religion, laws and politics to achieve the same end – controlling women’s reproductive biology. The use of mutilating genital surgery in some 28 countries of Africa and the Middle East wounds about three million young girls every year. The current profusion of ultrasound and “personhood” bills being passed by Republican male legislators across the U.S. are the human equivalent of insects’ copulatory plugs. These men are probably no more aware they are acting out such a primitive biological scenario than are insect males. They are caught up in a form of mass hysteria reminiscent of medieval witch hunts and persecution of women. Indeed, the attempt to vilify Planned Parenthood is similar to medieval persecution of women who gave advice on preventing births.

If the current misogynist movement led by Republican men were not so dangerous and harmful to women and our entire society, it would make an interesting anthropological field study. It’s unprecedented in U.S. history, to see males, primarily in one major political party, using the legal process and available medical technology to turn back the clock, prevent access to, and even ban medical advances that benefit men as well as women. Yes, many women accept their subjugation and support these efforts. But would they if they understood that from a biological perspective, these men are acting as brainless as beetles? With this difference: Male insects are ou

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By Elvin Lim

Rick Santorum had a great night, but he would need to win 70 percent of the delegates moving forward to unseat front-runner Mitt Romney. That’s not going to happen, but it’ll be a painful road toward the increasingly inevitable. As late as it is in this game, powerful conservatives like Thomas Sowell, Rush Limbaugh, and Tony Perkins are still advocating for Rick Santorum and other non-moderate candidates. Every day they continue to do this, they make less likely confident predictions from outside the beltway that Republicans will come together in the fall against Obama.


The problem could go away if Rick Santorum bowed out, but he has absolutely no reason to. At worst he would be a Hillary Clinton — a serious challenger to the eventual nominee, someone who ran a very credible campaign, and the candidate all eyes will turn to first in the next nomination race. Since all the benefits accrue specifically to Santorum and all the cost is diffused across the entire party, the candidate is here to stay for as long as Romney has not clinched his 1144th delegate.

This means that Romney wouldn’t be able to turn to a frontal, undistracted campaign against Obama just when Americans check out, tune out, and head to the beaches in summer. Most Americans would have made up their minds about their vote by then, and there may not be enough time between September and November for the constant barrage of negative messages and psychological massaging to convince independents that Obama is so bad that he needs to be fired.

The Republican “establishment,” otherwise read as Romney’s supporters, fear this more than anything, and for the love of God — no pun intended — simply don’t understand why Tea Partiers and Southern evangelicals are continuing on the road to electoral perdition. Yet while resentments are building and intra-party strife is festering, it isn’t the moderate Republicans but the Rush Limbaughs of the world who are ironically assuming that an upper-crust, French-speaking Mormon from the Northeast who entered the one percent by way of Wall Street would be able to put Humpty Dumpty together again before the party faces Barack Obama. Hubris!

Next up are Washington, DC and Wisconsin. That means relatively cash-strapped Rick Santorum now has a windfall of a week and some to gloat over his victory in Louisiana, and consolidate the narrative that he is a credible candidate and the truly conservative alternative to Romney. Yet each time the Republican Party has thrown an anti-Romney candidate a lifeline — and doing so has been the leitmotif of campaign 2012 — it has deprived itself of one in the real contest that is to determine the eventual occupant of the White House.

All this is also to say that we are witnessing the maturation of American conservatism. For years observers have described liberalism as a bloated tent filled with too many strange bedfellows. But all we were saying is that it is necessary for a dominant ideology to co-opt many disparate factions in order to form a governing majority. Finally, American conservatism, nearly 60, is big enough to have its own internecine feuds played out in the public square (and not just in the Na

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By Elvin Lim

Mitt Romney had an ok Tuesday night, no better or worse than the ones he’s had so far. But it is still a story because Romney needed his wins in Arizona and especially Michigan. No news is great news for a campaign’s whose raison d’être has consistently been “take whoever is the anti-Romney candidate down.”

And therein lies the weakness of Romney’s candidacy. He had his donors sweating yet again when news spread that Democrats in Michigan’s open primary were going to turn out to tip the state in Santorum’s favor. The result is that Romney’s three-point win there pales in comparison to his lead over the eventual nominee back in 2008, which was nine percent. In 2008 there was only one anti-Obama candidate by March. Romney faces not one, but three anti-Romneys this late in the game. Looking ahead to Super Tuesday, Newt Gingrich has a home field advantage in the biggest delegate prize so far in Georgia and Ron Paul is positioned to do well in the Alaska and North Dakota caucuses.

Rick Santorum, for his part, still has some momentum left in him because the Michigan results were partly masked by the fact that 184,000 had voted early and Santorum’s surge occurred only recently. The campaign will try to clinch a symbolic win on Sunday in Washington, which is a caucus state (but whose delegates will not be bound by the results). With or without Washington, Santorum has a real shot at victory in Ohio, where he polls well with blue-collar conservatives. All told, there are still not implausible ways out of the Romney nomination.

This is not all the candidate’s fault, however — bland and awkward performer he may be. If the RNC wanted to lengthen the nomination process and expand proportional representation (rather than winner-take-all) in the races, it should have waited until there was an open race on the Democratic side as well. In other words, Republican elders tried to mimic what the Democrats managed to do in 2008 and it is starting to blow up in their face. What compounds this strategic misstep is that in order to punish states who had moved their primaries up the calendar, the RNC, by stripping errant states for front-loading, made it even more possible for a slew of early contests to name a different frontrunner than in previous contests. Thereby they permitted more chaos when they should have known that this would occur alongside an incumbent Democrat with no challenge to his nomination. And of course there was the added wild card of Citizens’ United and the resulting superPACs that has made the survival of little-known candidates more likely than before.

Moving forward, the RNC will have to weigh the costs of controlling the primary calendar, because doing so has weakened the momentum of whoever emerges as the party’s nominee and shortened the time left for him to campaign as a general election candidate. For his part, Romney will be throwing everything but the kitchen sink in to sustain his air of inevitability; but the RNC has effectively determined by rules set in 2010 that the deal definitely won’t be sealed next Tuesday.

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