Surprise! its October

Lots of odds and ends:

Though her approval rating is dropping, might Palin pull off an October surprise? No, nothing involving the military (whew!). But she could accomplish much of the same thing with a big splashy wedding of her pregnant daughter and the girl's boyfriend. Shotgun weddings back in fashion? And Palin does know how to wield a gun.

When I've done training for programs that try to influence change (such as making my church denomination more gay friendly) the emphasis is on personal stories -- how a particular event made me feel, what I learned from it, and how it changed what I did. I can't say the training made me a spokesman for much of anything, but the premise is sound. People connect to stories. Sharon Begley of Newsweek says that people connect with Palin's story quite easily (or, given her dropping approval rating, did). There has always been a balance between voting your issues and voting your emotions with emotions usually winning. This year the emotional side is even stronger because with 24 hours news sources on TV and web we are bombarded with emotions and aren't able to take time to reflect on the issues. Enjoy this season of storytelling. The print edition of Newsweek has a drawing of Palin in a cluster of 10 eager listeners reading from the book "The Adventures of Sarah the Moose-Skinning Hockey Mom."

Sharon Begley has an article about the reliability of polls. At a time when one could say "another day, another 37 state polls" yet polls got some primary races quite wrong, there is a lot of discussion of poll methodology. Polls of "likely" voters tend to be more accurate, but to determine the likelihood of a voter are new voters, who tend to be for Obama, being excluded? Since it is illegal to do random-digit dialing to cell phones, are younger voters without landlines being undercounted? And back to the issue of balance between Dem and GOP respondents -- If your public is 30% GOP and your random-digit dialing gets you 45% GOP responses, a pollster might weight the GOP replies. But how stable is party identification? Do voters shift party allegiance when they switch candidates?

Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas has written with a great deal of passion that if one gets a start through Affirmative Action (as he did) one must always live with the shame and stigma that success, no matter how great, will always be suspect. Some people (including himself) say he got where he is only because he is black. The world mistrusts him and he mistrusts the world. The same stigma now seems to be at work in Palin. She got to be VP candidate because she is a woman, not because of her qualifications. The same mistrust appears to be playing out with Palin who sees everyone as a supporter or a hater.

Lionel Trilling was a English professor, literary critic, essayist and author who died in 1975. On the occasion of new publications of a few of his books, Jeremy McCarter of Newsweek took a look at some of Trilling's ideas. One of his books is "The Liberal Imagination" in which he shows fellow liberals a few blind spots. The problem is that liberalism, in explaining its goals, tends to simplify, producing lots of unintended consequences. To get the full story one should study liberal ideas through literature, because fiction doesn't (or doesn't have to) present the world in black and white, can present ideas in careful nuance with moral realism, and can teach sympathy and respect for variety. These ideas tend to get lost today because of our high-speed, always on media that tends to thwart imagination, attention span, and the willingness to read something with depth (gee, where have I heard that before?). Trilling highly recommends losing yourself in "The Princess Casamassima" by Henry James.

A new startup company is inverting the recycling equation. RecycleBank has trucks that rumble through suburban Boston, weighing and scanning the barcodes of recycling bins as they are dumped into the trucks. The weight and ID are sent to a website, where residents are given credit of 25 cents a pound which can be redeemed at area stores. Isn't recycling worth a latte? Offering a bit of incentive has shown recycle rates jump from 3% to 32% in Wilmington, Del. The company hopes to serve a million homes by the end of 2009. The Midwest might be hard for it to crack into because landfill fees are so cheap compared to the coasts.

If you allow me to be greedy, surely some of that money will trickle down to you. The last couple weeks showed up that lie. Greed does not get us to compassion, kindness, or social justice. It is time to eliminate it from economic policy.

The Mormon Church has a doctrine of Free Agency. An individual must determine the difference between good and evil and reap the benefits or consequences of those choices. This cycle of choice and consequence is the individual's own trial of faith, a piece of their plan of salvation. Amy Cox, the wife of the first counselor to a Mormon bishop condemns the church's meddling in the marriage protection amendments in Calif. and Arizona because such amendments restrict free agency. The church is meddling where it shouldn't. Mrs. Cox also says the Mormon Church has renounced its old belief that people with darker skins were cursed until they turned from their sinful ways, at which point their skin would supposedly lighten. Hmm. That never happened. The church should also renounce its belief that gays will become straight when they turn from their sinful ways. Perhaps all that Mormon sponsorship will mean those amendments will be linked closely with that church, causing a backlash and their defeat.