5 foolproof responses Obama can use to win the second debate!

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Roger Scimé.com

Roger Scimé: Political Commentator

If you’re anything like me, watching the presidential debates can be frustrating, annoying, and . . . well, insert your own adverb here.

Why didn’t he say this? How could he have missed saying that?

Well, I decided I couldn’t take any more of this so, I decided to list some rather obvious responses to some of the assertions that have been made thus far, and which I am certain will be so again.

First Assertion:  President Obama is a failed president. He has reduced neither the deficit nor the unemployment rate. He promised so much and has delivered so little.

  • Republican leaders stated publically that they would do everything in their to ensure that no piece of the President’s legislation would ever pass—not in the interests of the country, or because of ideology, but to deny him a second term. With the exception of the President’s healthcare and stimulus bills, the GOP’s strategy has worked almost flawlessly thus far.

Second Assertion:  Mitt Romney is a compassionate and caring person, not the robotic über-technocrat he is sometimes portrayed as.

  • Gov. Romney may have demonstrated that he cares for individuals in whom he is invested personally or emotionally, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into caring for a nation’s citizens. A president must show compassion for all Americans—not just a chosen few. His “forty-seven percent” comment strongly indicated that only fifty-three percent of Americans will be entitled to his attention.
  • I’ll never forget when, during the administration of the first George Bush, he and Barbara were asked something along the lines of what they would do if their daughter told them she wanted to have an abortion. There response was that they would comfort, counsel, commiserate with, and console her—not treat her as a criminal. Why is it that people will make moral exception for those they know and/or love personally—but are unwilling to make exceptions for those they don’t.

Third Assertion: Look at the unemployment numbers. Under President Obama, more Americans—women especially—are out of work than ever before, and it’s all his fault.

  • Republicans claim that under Obama, unemployment has increased in this country, notwithstanding the numbers of people going back to work.  According to news reports, a disproportionate number of the job losses during the past four years, were in the public sector: teachers, social workers, and other civil servants—and overwhelmingly women, by the way. These new unemployed were, in fact, “furloughed” by Republican-controlled state legislatures.

Fourth Assertion:  Under this administration, the deficit has ballooned.

  • Sometime during the end of the previous administration—I believe it was during Bush’s second term—it was publicly acknowledged that the cost of the Iraq war had not been included in previous budgets, but had been part of a separate, secret one. The deficit that Obama inherited included those trillions.

Fifth Assertion:  With the economy still sluggish the country needs somebody at the helm who is businessman, who knows how to create jobs, and who understands small business. That man is Mitt Romney.

  • People continue to make this mistake; it’s called a false premise: The United States is nothing but a business; therefore, a businessman is in the best position to lead it. The United States is not a corporation and cannot be run like one. The president cannot fire members of Congress who disagree with or impede him, and he cannot govern by fiat. He must represent all Americans­—not just his own “shareholders,” those who agree with or support him.
  • Being a successful businessman does not automatically qualify somebody to be President. After all, Ross Perot had been a successful businessman before running for office, and George W. Bush’s résumé was even deeper: he had a Harvard MBA!
  • From all the available evidence, Mitt Romney has never even come close to understanding small businesses: After graduating from from Harvard, he went straight to Bain. He never created a job, never had to meet a payroll. Even George W. Bush (God help us!) had more experience in running a business than Gov. Romney. And we all saw how well that one worked out <Insert sarcasm font>.

Agree with me? Disagree? That’s what the little comment box at the end is for.

 

What if billionaires had to pay $500 million in taxes?

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In 2008, while I was out canvassing registered voters for the Obama campaign, I’d occasionally run into a conservative Republican who disagreed with the suggestion that asking billionaires to pay taxes at a 50% rate was not immoral. “Nobody should have to pay that much in taxes. It just wasn’t fair.”And, at first blush, 50% does seem excessive. Until you look at what the numbers really mean, that is.

So, I’d let these folks (usually lower middle-class, and sinking fast), hold tight to their indignation, allowing it to fester and grow, until their outrage over the utter plight of the poor possessor of a billion or more dollars (Bill Gates, you may remember, was once worth an estimated $40 billion) had reached the point where a little pustule-popping was in order.

That’s when I’d ask them, in all innocence, if they thought that a million dollars was a lot of money. Once they agreed that it was, I’d up the ante a bit: “What about $10 million? Do you think you could live comfortably on that amount?” I could almost see them adding up the prices of private jets, European chalets, barrels of rare single-malts. Then, before they’d had a chance to answer, I’d hit them, in succession, with $25 million? $50 million? Even $100 million?  Could even a person with very expensive tastes manage to live on a measly $100 million dollars? Continue reading →

Would Woody Have Approved?

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Woody Guthrie "This Land Is Your Land"

“This Machine Kills Fascists”

When Woody Guthrie submitted “This Land Is Your Land” for copyright in 1940, he wrote on the manuscript, ““This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.”

I hope he wouldn’t mind if others just . . . I don’t know . . . added to it. After all, rearranging and adapting songs has always been in the best folk music tradition. And, that’s what I did, wrote a couple of additional verses.

But before I get to them, whoever’s reading this ought to know that the song that’s been called “A love song to America,” was just a bit subversive. In fact, Woody penned the piece as a response to Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” a song for which he had a decided distaste.

Two of the original verses that are usually omitted from school-house songbooks, because of their distinctly political tenors, are:

As I went walking, I saw a sign there,
And on the sign there, It said “no trespassing.”
But on the other side, it didn’t say nothing!
That side was made for you and me.

 In the squares of the city, In the shadow of a steeple;
By the relief office, I’d seen my people.
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking,
Is this land made for you and me?

It is in the spirit of “This Land Is Your Land” that I offer three verses of my own:

On lines like cattle, our hopes unheeded,
We jobless waited, for the jobs we needed;
Wall Street was laughing, and I had to wonder:
Is this land still made for you and me?

 All Wall Street’s power and wealth can’t stop me.
Not its lawsuits threatening; nor its jail cells waiting.
I’ll sing my message—to whoever’s listening, ‘cause
I can still sing for you and me!

 No Plutocrat can purloin my freedom.
I’ve the Bill of Rights and The Constitution.
So, now lets rise up—and stand together. Remind them . . .
This land was made for you and me!

 Maybe it isn’t Woody, but I’d like to think he would’ve approved.

4 Awesome Compliments I Received Regarding My Recent Guest Appearance in a Virtual Classroom*

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Roger Scimé, guest lecturerOkay, okay . . . I know I’ve been derelict in keeping this blog up to date. I keep promising to share intriguing, interesting, unique, original, curated, and so-called “remarkable” content, but continue to leave huge gaps.

This time, though, I’m making no promises: I’m just gonna go with the slow and see what happens.

So, then: A few weeks ago, it was my privilege to be invited to be a guest speaker at one of a friend’s online lectures in ethics at The International Academy of Design & Technology. The subject was “The Ethics of Feminism” or some such, and I was to play the part of the archetypal feminist. That was a few weeks ago.

Yesterday, Jerry shared with me a few of the comments he received from students who had either attended in real-time or had listened to a recording afterward. Here they are:

  1. I really enjoyed the guest speakers at the live chat and wish my work schedule would have allowed me more opportunity to attend the live chats
  2. The guest speaker was the highlight of the week; he made the topic “real” and interesting; hope to see more guest speakers like him
  3. The live chat classes were the best, and the most interesting was the guest speaker in week 4 – which I would love to see in more classes. It helps to hear life experiences from others that share your ideas; he was awesome!
  4. Roger in week 4 was our guest speaker. While I could not attend the live chat, I listened and wow! He made it all clear; to hear a real feminist was awesome! I would take the class again just to hear what he and Jerry had to say about other topics. Keep it up!

To say I was jazzed would be a classic understatement. I freely admit that I’m a frustrated academic at heart, and validation like this just makes life a bit more tolerable.

*NOTE: This headline construction is an over-the-top example of link-bait formatting. Of course, the content has to be compelling as well. . . .

Entertaining ideas . . .

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My mother used to tell the story of how—at a very young age—I stood up in front of a crowd and, without any prompting, did an acceptable impression of Elvis Presley.

That’s when she knew, she told me, that music and performing were in my future. Accordingly, shortly afterward she bought me my first guitar—a Stella with Black Diamond strings—and thus set me on a course a course for the rest of my life. Continue reading →

15 (new) things I learned at WordCamp Reno-Tahoe 2011

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Roger Scime | ScribeSite.com | Words Music Pictures

My WordCamp Reno-Tahoe 2011 Badge

For months now, I’ve been stumbling around WordPress. Sure, I have a blog, post to it semi-regularly, and have installed enough plugins and widgets to make it somewhat functional.

But, I’ve always known there was more. As websites increasingly migrate toward the Web 2.0 engagement paradigm, it is apparent that WordPress has become the de facto platform-de-jure, for not only the blogs for which it was originally intended, but for entire websites.

During the 90s, I’d been a moderately successful website designer, but some time taken off had put me far behind the curve to the point where I either had to evolve my skills or throw in the towel. I chose the former.

Therefore, it was with no little satisfaction that I learned of WordCamp Reno-Tahoe 2011, a two-day series of workshops being held on the UNR campus, less than a mile from where I live. It was affordable, too!

I hastened to register.

And this morning I packed up my laptop, threw a notebook and some pencils into my backpack, and headed out for an entire day of WordPress instruction. Boy, was it ever worth it!

Not only was there swag (stickers and decals, pencils, buttons, and even a t-shirt), but evangelists as knowledgeable and enthusiastic as any fanboy in the earliest days of Apple Computers. I even learned (much to my chagrin) that there is an active WordPress community here in Reno, of which I’d been woefully unaware—even though I’ve lived here for the past 8 years.

There was even a Genius Bar (similar to Apple’s), where WordPress experts were on hand to help folks like—answering questions and offering solutions. WordPress, after all, is more than a blog, and—for all its ease of use—can be more than a little intimidating.

But, enough preamble. Here are just a few of the things I learned today that will, hopefully, a) make me a better blogger, and b) make ScribeSite.com a better blog Continue reading →

400 ways to shrink unemployment, rebuild the Midwest, and balance the budget

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A Benevolent Billionaire

During the three or four weeks I was stranded in the off-the-grid backwater I call Conundrum Canyon, cut off from Internet and cell phone access, I had a lot of time to think about a few things that had been bothering me:

  1. The devastation caused by the dozens of tornadoes wreaking destruction in the Midwest and the many thousands of new homeless and unemployed
  2. The still-unfinished reconstruction of New Orleans
  3. The economy
    1. Er . . . I’m still unemployed, despite having a BA, an MA, and a ton of experience in the fields most active at the moment: content creation, optimization, SEO, SEM, and Social Media Facilitation.
  4. State budgets that call for draconian cuts in personel and services

A solution that might satisfy most

Am I so megalomaniacal that I actually believed I could come up with a solution that would solve each of the aforementioned problems without:

  • imposing a huge tax hike,
  • creating an equally huge, state-sponsored bureaucracy,
  • freaking out the conservatives,
  • alarming the liberals,
  • rallying the libertarians, or
  • finally bringing fascism to the United States?

Am I really that certain of my own smarts?

You betcha.

Leveraging the super-rich: 400+ US billionaires

It was Ralph Nader’s book, Only The Super-Rich Can Save Us, that got me thinking: If—as some estimates put it—70% of the nation’s wealth is controlled by 12% of the population, why not come up with a way to leverage those assets so that everyone benefits: The super-rich, the poor and unemployed, the rapidly shrinking middle class, the country as a whole?

Forbes recently listed—by state—the approximately 400 US billionaires. When you consider that $1 billion is equal to $1,000 millions, well, that’s not nothing.

So, here’s what I came up with: Ask each of these super (some might say “obscenely)-wealthy folks to chip in a bit of their assets to help their fellow citizens.

Heck, might as well throw in the multimillionaires, too.

  1. President Obama goes on national TV to plead the case;
  2. each Senator and House member contacts  each of the millionaires and billionaires in his or her state and/or districts to donate a portion of their wealth ($1 million or more),
  3. to a fund that would go toward rebuilding the cities of the Midwest, hiring the best and brightest teachers for our schools and colleges,
  4. I hate this part, but I have to say it: Hire only only those who are in the US legally, except in the case of some very specialized skills or abilities.

Private-enterprise WPA

It would be like a private-enterprise WPA, putting millions of unemployed Americans back to work, giving folks some much-needed breathing room.

And, why would they do this? Well, taking altruism or patriotism off the table for a moment, why not call it an appeal to egotism or rational self-interest?

  • Egotism: erect statues, shout proclamations, name plazas after these benefactors. Hell, if somebody were to restore the legislative cuts to the University budget, I’d buy the sumbitch a statue myself!
  • Rational self-interest: Hmm . . . forget this one. If the super-rich haven’t figured out for themselves that if the US sinks, their ultimate demise is just as inevitable, well my argument’s probably not going to help.

Now, readers must be thinking to themselves: This is too easy. Why hasn’t any body thought of this already? Well, my answer is, maybe they have. I haven’t read Mr. Nader’s book (the title was intriguing enough), but perhaps the answer lies within its pages.

Or maybe the idea has been debated and debunked elsewhere.

There’s a lot more to this so-called “solution” of mine, and if you’d like to know more  about the nuances and arguments, well, that’s what the comment box is for.

Off Point: Country Music, editing, and me

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As some of you may be aware, in addition to being a social media facilitator, search engine optimizer and manager, writer (with a Master’s in journalism), and any number of other things, I am and have been a professional musician for the better part of my life, sometimes full-time, sometimes part. But, always. I also write songs: nothing you’ve probably ever heard, but still . . .

So, this weekend I attended a songwriters’ workshop and evaluation  at the Nugget, so that I might get some feedback from the professional evaluators who were judging.

As luck would have it, KTNV Channel 2 News was on the scene, taping a story for their evening news. They taped a snippet of my entry, and interviewed me afterward.

The question was, “Why are you here today?” and I think I answered it pretty well.

  1. Some people are so familiar with their own works, that they are unable to see them. It’s not that they’re in denial, it’s just that they see what they expect to see. I actually wrote a blog post about this.
  2. Editing yourself can be self-defeating and next to impossible. When I blue-pencil my prose or fiction (or lyrics, for that matter), I generally obsess about it, changing words here and there (wielding my thesaurus like a madman with a chainsaw) to the extent that I manage to leech all of the spontaneity and “juice out if it.

That’s why objective listeners, readers, observers can be invaluable.

What do you think? Are objective evaluations important?

The Creative Companion: A dispatch from Conundrum Canyon

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Creative enough for you? It's not what you think.

Just to give you an idea of how out of touch and off-the-grid I was between May 4th and the 25th—the time I spent stuck, not it Lodi, but in in the place I’m calling Conundrum Canyon—I actually picked up and read a terrific little book on advertising called The Creative Companion by adman David Fowler.

A book on advertising. . . . me? Who’d'a thunk it?

In my defense, it was only 33 pages long and I figured I could knock it off in, like, 45 minutes or so.

You’ve probably already guessed what’s coming next. I admit it, okay: The Creative Companion is a terrific little book, full of cute and clever insights (but not the precious, cloying kind), and presented with wit and—thank goodness—an economy of prose. Plus, it’s a book that’s perfect for those of us who wonder, on occasion, if we are “talentless schmucks” (as Chris Wall so delicately anoints it in the Forword).

Following are the first three of Fowler’s tips on how to goose one’s creativity (I might add a few more as time goes on and as time permits).

Just saying, though; these are tips on advertising, so some of the rhetoric might be ad-oriented. Oh, and the chapter titles are verbatim.

  1. Get up and go: Browse bookstores, grab a video camera and stalk the streets. Bookstores, as Fowler explains, contain “the sum total of human experience,” while total strangers will offer their opinions on your product—as long as you describe your queries as “marketing research.” He suggests staying away from doing your research on the Web: “You won’t find any real people there to interact with. And you’re still just sitting there in your office.”
  2. Is your baby a monkey? Somebody has rejected an idea you’ve fallen in love with. They’ve called it a “monkey.” Fowler suggests that you listen to the input, and then resolve the issue on those terms. Bring it back, with that new way of looking at it. Or not. It may have been a monkey all along.

    Scribe Site | Roger Scime | words images music

    Is this my baby?

  3. Write a theme, not a line. We all know (or should know) know what a tag line is: it’s shorthand for the underlying theme that drives a product. Fowler tells us that if you can define the parameters of its underlying theme, the line (which he would prefer calling a “theme line” as opposed to a slogan or tag line—it sounds more dignified, he says) will follow from that.

Now, all of this makes more than a bit of sense, even to a right-brain kind of guy like me, and I’m going to go out on a limb and recommend it to anybody who could use a jolt of creativity now and again.

The Creative Companion, in all of its 33-page glory, can be read online at TheCreativeCompanion.com

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