Podcast 461

All About Iowa. Do you want the Iowa Caucuses to determine which presidential candidates are ‘viable’? In a state of slightly more than three million people, party leaders expect one hundred fifty thousand to show up to caucus, slightly more than in the 2012 cycle. Over the last year Iowans have been sliced and diced by pollsters, pundits, political psychologists, and sociologists. Anyone who attends political events – and there have been hundreds of them since last year – will see famous candidates, film stars, and national TV stars. It’s a spectacle, a circus, and a show being put on for one state. As the hours are counting down to the caucus Monday, February 1st, the Bob Davis Podcasts attends a Marco Rubio rally. One side of the room is reserved for the stage, the other for media. In between, are the Iowans, ready to comment when reporters approach them. Of course reporters will approach, like fish feeding at the water’s surface. ‘Who will you caucus for?’, ‘What do you think of Donald Trump?’. The answers to these and many other scintillating questions will be filed, dissected, and added to the national story line. All About Iowa. Fasten your seat belts. A rural backwater, albiet a very nice one with very nice people, is about to decide which candidates are the most viable. At least that’s how they see this process. After Monday’s caucus, the story lines will change, predictions will be adjusted, and some campaigns will never recover. Is this how we want to elect a president? While there is much to celebrate in the American political system, as I attend events and cover the caucus and the events leading up to it, what comes through louder and clearer is the dark and potentially dangerous relationship between big government, big media, politicians, pollsters and the population of a single state that has insinuated itself into the political process in an unprecedented way. All about Iowa? Indeed. Sponsored by X Government Cars and Ryan Plumbing and Heating of Saint Paul.

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New Thinking Part II – Podcast 453

New Thinking Part II. Tyranny of The State? Browsing through today’s headlines yields a mix of factional outrage and emotion. Whether it’s the President issuing executive orders to ‘end’ mass shootings, or activist ranchers from Nevada showing up in Oregon to occupy a federal wildlife facility, or the UK parliament debating whether to ‘keep Donald Trump out’, it seems like the political world has gone crazy. With more and more people doing anything and everything to get on TV, or get clicks, eyeballs, ears, or supporters to show up at controlled events, one wonders whether the proverbial mob, feared most by the founders, has finally reared its ugly head. The second installment of the Bob Davis Podcast series ‘New Thinking’ looks at the desire factions seem to have to coerce ‘someone’ to ‘do something’ and the hypocrisy implicit in those demands. More ‘action’ these days is being taken by courts, unelected councils and boards controlling huge sums of money, their own police forces, are issuing edicts local towns and villages have to comply with. Local princes hold councils, in secret and behind closed doors to pound elected officials into submission. Protests are mounted by factional fronts with hashtag names and shadowy backing, all with the goal of dominating local or national television coverage. Presidential candidates vow to reverse executive orders of previous presidents, make promises that can’t and won’t be kept, and set unrealistic goals. Aren’t the people in this country supposed to be in charge? Isn’t the government supposed to protect our rights? How do we get things back on track when people operate on loose facts, when debate is a contest for the most slicing snarky comment, and name calling is the order of the day? Sponsored by Ryan Plumbing and Heating of Saint Paul and X Government Trucks.

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Podcast 450

Beware The Soothsayers. So much of our media these days is caught up in predicting the future. Weather, economics, sports and especially politics, isn’t so much about fact as it is about predictions based on opinion and poorly supported ‘fatcs’. Without a real basis in science or proven facts, we’re constantly told what the ‘future will bring’. It’s a wonder news anchors and ‘commentators’ don’t wear brightly colored head dresses and look into a crystal ball. One of the reasons we are ill served by a modern media possessed of the greatest technology for informing known to man, is its executives exhort their on screen ‘actors’ and so called ‘journalists’ to use opinion and hearsay to ‘predict’ what ‘will’ happen, rather than just report the facts around an event, or ‘the news’. For instance, lower prices for gasoline was going to ‘act like a tax cut’ and we would have economic growth. The Christmas retail shopping season might be a little down, but it would still be good. Donald Trump would be a flash in the pan, and would ‘collapse’ as soon as voters ‘came to their senses’. This is the time of year astrologers make their predictions for 2016, which are about as accurate as the wild ‘predictions’ made by the cable news services, round table discussions, commentary pieces distributed on line, and most of the rest of the media conglomeration complex, especially talk radio and the cable news channels. What do you think would happen if they stopped making predictions? There’d be a lot of dead air. In fact most of what is being broadcast and written these days is little more than fortune telling, and not very good fortune telling at that. In a late night podcast by the fire, as we labor under a winter storm watch in the upper midwest (at least a foot of snow ‘predicted’ with the ‘storm’ starting Monday night), time to air some concerns about what we are being told, and talk about the antidote to it. Sponsored by Hydrus Performance, and by the Mobile Podcast Command Unit of The Bob Davis Podcasts. 

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