Good evening,
I asked, and you nominated 36 different Minnesota lawmakers as the "best orators" in the Legislature! Now it's time to choose a winner. I'm going to use "approval voting" for this. From the list of nominees, you can vote here for as many lawmakers as you want. If you think they're an exceptional orator, vote for them. If not, skip. I'll total up the Democrat and the Republican with the most votes and announce them in Friday's newsletter. That means you have until noon on Friday to vote!
Minnesota's legislative auditor examined the state's contracts with two private companies providing COVID testing, and found no over-billing. [Read more from The Associated Press]
Minnesota leaders have appointed almost all the members of a nine-member panel to recommend how to spend $250 million in pay for "frontline" pandemic workers. The members: Commissioners Steve Grove, Robert Doty and Roslyn Robertson, Sens. Mary Kiffmeyer (R), Karin Housley (R) and Erin Murphy (DFL), and Reps. Ryan Winkler (DFL) and Cedrick Frazier (DFL). The last member, a House Republican, will be announced Thursday. Under the panel's framework, seven of the nine members need to agree on a plan to recommend to the full Legislature. (That means, if you do the math, that with six Democrats and three Republicans, at least one Republican would need to support any plan to pass — and realistically, probably a Senate Republican, given the need to pass the Senate.)
Opponents of Enbridge's Line 3 oil pipeline often call for the U.S. to "honor the treaties." Learn more about the specific treaties in question. [Read more in MinnPost]
Polls show former President Donald Trump is immensely popular in the 2021 Republican Party. But Trump's GOP approval rating doesn't tell the whole story. Republican pollster Fabrizio, Lee and Associates found a more complex picture. Only around 15 percent of current Republicans are "Never-Trumpers." But another 20 percent fall into a category they call the "Post-Trump GOP" — they approve of the former president, but are ready to move on and see a different presidential nominee. The pivotal group is the 28 percent categorized as "Trump Boosters" — they like and still support Trump, but their self-identity as Republicans is stronger than their self-identity as Trump supporters. Meanwhile another 27 percent are "Diehard Trumpers," who value Trump over the GOP, and 10 percent are noted for their open embrace of conspiracy theories alongside their near-unanimous support for Trump. [Read more] | |
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Is the left wing or the right wing more to blame for America's ongoing culture wars? Thomas Edsall wraps up both sides of this argument in a thoughtful column. [ Read more in the New York Times]
Something completely different: Today Twitter announced it was eliminating "Fleets," its self-destructing tweet feature. It was a disappointing announcement to Twitter, given how much many people love similarly transitory messages on Snapchat and Instagram Stories. But no one loved Fleets, despite Twitter's best efforts to make fetch happen.
There's something deeper happening here, though. Here I'm drawing on the theory of the late scholar Walter Ong, author of "Orality and Literacy" and other works. He argued that the distinction between the spoken word and written word was more than just different ways to convey the same meaning, but that they're fundamentally different. The most important of these distinctions is that oral speech is evanescent — it exists in the moment. Without writing, "you know what you can recall." In contrast, the written word exists outside of time; you can "look something up."
This has all sorts of consequences that Ong gets into, and that I don't have room for in a newsletter about Minnesota politics. The immediate point, though, is that by making the written word transitory, Snapchat and its ilk are effectively making their messages more like speech.
That's important because many people much prefer oral speech over reading! Among other things, most of us pick up oral speech fairly naturally as small children, but have to somewhat laboriously learn how to read and write later in life. Many people never get very good at reading, and many of those who do don't like it very much. Voracious readers, people who are constantly devouring books, articles, short stories and more, are arguably the aberrant group.
So while I find Snapchat and Instagram Stories bewildering and hostile — I can't look back to see what people previously said! — it's no wonder this type of medium has been a hit. But given the vocal minority to which I belong — where even my oral speech, people have told me, takes on somewhat of the cadence of the written words with which I spend so much of my days — it's also not surprising that Fleets failed. Twitter is an app with the written word at its core, far more than photo-focused Instagram. Its audience was not, it turned out, eager for a more oral way of tweeting.
Listen: Today is Bastille Day, the French national holiday. (But not always!) So I've got a treat for all of you. This is 1981 presidential campaign theme song of French politician Jacques Chirac . (He actually lost that campaign, and wouldn't actually get elected president of France until 1995.) It is very of its time, and so bad it's amazing. [Listen] | | |
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