Red state, blue balled

So much for "family values." So much for smug conservative Christian uprightness. So much for the lead-in, the snide "I told you sos" can now begin...

What follows is a very long column from today's Washington Post that continues the process of enlightening us about the whole, unnerving but frighteningly true divide between the "Red States" and the "Blue States." No, not the obviously funny linking of "red" with the conservatives ... I hope you've had enough sniggers over that one already (bad Evil Media, bad!). This is a look into the naughty habits of the so-called conservative bedrock of our quickly dividing nation. In 200 years, when students in the various balkanized states left on this continent study the history of this big rock, they'll have to memorize Dubbya's name and accomplishments as the figurehead of the beginning of the end of our Union.

Oh Goddess, that's so depressing. Let's get back to the porn...

Anyway, even if you just skim the first third of the column, you'll figure out that the hullabaloo about values is a crock. Yet, there are deep divides cracking us to bits. What are they if not sex?

Well, look at some of the telling quotes about who these supposed bedrock folks (where are Fred and Barney when you need them? At the Water Buffalo lodge, watching "Barbie Blows Bedrock"!) think are the downfall of American Civilization:

Hollywood.

So while they're buying up porno DVDs off the Internet in between typing in their credit cards as fast as they can to join even MORE sites to view naked Asian teens, these folks think "Hollywood" is bad.

So what is it about TV shows and movies that are so much worse for us than Forrest Hump?

I'm thinking...Jews. Blacks. Women. Jews. Latinos, except for Jennifer Lopez because she's rich and hot and lightens her hair and she's hot. Some more blacks and Jews. Hell, look at UPN. I bet it's not THAT big in Utah!

Yeah, I'm thinking now that whenever I hear a rightwinger rant on about values, what he is really spouting is code for "Keep America White." Red plus white equals pink, just like your little ...

Oh well. At least we all have one thing in common: Money is still green.



GOP Corporate Donors Cash In on Smut

By Terry M. Neal
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 21, 2004; 6:24 AM

Since the election, the e-mails from readers have poured into my
mailbox. The common theme from conservatives has been that Nov. 2 was
a triumph of values -- embodied by the GOP heartland over the heathens
of the coastal elite.

Typical of the comments was this one from Arizona: "I do think the
Democrat Party is identified -- justifiably -- with much of the
vulgarization so prominently displayed by many celebrities,
particularly those in the entertainment industry. Hey, we pick our
friends."

In this case, the Democrats Party's "friends" are the
expletive-spewing Whoopi Goldberg and her Hollywood pals, whom
conservatives demonize. But Republicans have their friends, too. While
not as obvious as the Goldbergs of the world, this corporate elite
also profits from the peddling of lowbrow entertainment and, in some
cases, outright smut.

In fact, just as the Democratic and Republic elites both profit from
creating and selling popular entertainment, red states and blue states
don't differ much in their consumption of it.

In my recent Yahoo Political Players interview with Tucker Carlson,
the conservative writer and CNN Crossfire co-host asserted that the
red/blue divide is rooted in the dismay many Americans perceive in the
vast social and cultural changes happening in the country and the fact
that the masses of people in middle America blame a distant, coastal
elite for fostering those changes.

"The people who run the Republican Party are elites just like any
other elite, and they don't share the same cultural concerns as the
center of the country," said Carlson. "They don't -- they're all
pro-choice on abortion, they're all pro-gay rights, they're all thrice
married, you know what I mean? And they summer in the Hamptons, too.
And so they don't have anything in common, that's true, with
evangelicals who make up the bulk of their party."

In this world of irony, corporate leaders at companies as diverse as
News Corp., Marriott International and Time Warner can profit by
selling red state consumers the very material that red state culture
is supposed to despise. Those elites then funnel the proceeds to the
GOP, which in turn has used the money to successfully convince red
state voters that the other political party is solely responsible for
the decline of the civilization.

Community Values
There was never any doubt how the good people of Utah County, Utah,
would vote on Nov. 2. It has long prided itself as a bastion of
conservatism and family values. And so when voters were given the
opportunity to choose between President Bush and Sen. John F. Kerry,
86 percent of them went for Bush, making Utah County the second most
Republican county in the most Republican state in the country. Utah
County has a population of roughly 370,000. Its largest employer is
the Mormon-run Brigham Young University.

But Utah County is also the home of a mid-1990s court case that
demonstrated some of the ambiguity about "values," even in the reddest
of the red states. Randy Spencer was the attorney that the court
appointed to defend a the Movie Buff video store in American Fork from
local prosecutors who had charged the store's owner with 15 counts of
pornography for renting tapes such as "Jugsy," "Young Buns II" and
"Sex Secrets of High-Priced Call Girls." The prosecutors claimed the
store was violating the community standards of suburban Provo.

Spencer, who describes himself as a devout Mormon, challenged the
prosecution's definition of the community's values by subpoenaing
records that showed Utah County tolerated the consumption of porn in
several outlets: Utah County cable subscribers had ordered at least
20,000 explicit movies in the past two years; the Sun Coast Video
store in the town of Orem was deriving 20 percent of its rental sales
from adult movies, even though adult movies only made up 2 percent of
the store's inventory; Dirty Jo Punsters in nearby Spanish Fork was
racking up on average $111,000 dollars per year selling sex toys, blow
up dolls and other adult fare; the Provo Marriott across the street
from the courthouse sold 3,448 adult pay-per-view movie rentals in
1998 alone.

"I was assigned to the case, and it was a real evolution for me," said
Spencer in an interview last week. "The same religious values that I
have are protected by the same Constitution that protects my
neighbor's rights to do some things that I might not necessarily do."

About a year after the Utah case, a similar scenario played out in
Hamilton County, Ohio, a conservative Cincinnati suburb. In 2001,
under pressure from an influential local antiporn group, Citizens for
Community Values, prosecutors filed obscenity charges against two
local video stores for selling adult videos. The Cincinnati Enquirer
launched an investigation of community standards and found that:

"Last year, more than 21,000 Hamilton County residents purchased
26,000 explicit videos from one of the nation's largest mail-order
companies. A company spokeswoman described those sales as typical for
a community of this size. . . . In January of this year, 182,000
Greater Cincinnati residents -- an estimated 70,000 from Hamilton
County -- visited an adult Web site at least once. Nielsen -
NetRatings found that 21.8 percent of all residents here who went
online visited an adult site. The national average for January was
21.4 percent. In recent months, Hamilton County residents bought adult
movies on pay-per-view TV at about the same rate as viewers did in
other mid-sized TV markets. The numbers suggest county residents are
quiet contributors to the adult industry's rapid growth. And with
every purchase, they change Hamilton County's long-held notion of a
community standard."

Again, the community standard in Hamilton County -- which favored Bush
over Kerry 53-47 percent -- was pretty much what it was everywhere
else. In this particular case, one of the video storeowners pleaded
guilty and paid a small fine. The other decided to fight and was
acquitted in a jury trial.

Adult entertainment is not the only area in which cultural tastes seem
to be consistent across the country. Primetime viewing habits are very
similar too.

Desperate Housewives, the hottest new show on television, features
plotlines such as one in which a married woman is having an affair
with her 17-year-old gardener and another in which a man murders his
neighbor. Turns out, the show performed better in the November sweeps
month in the red state markets of Dallas-Fort Worth (first), Atlanta
(first) and Kansas City (second) than it did in the Blue state markets
of New York (fourth), Chicago (fourth) and Boston (third), according
to Nielson Media Research. The show did quite well in red state
markets Salt Lake City (fourth) and Birmingham (sixth) as well.

While my e-mailer from Arizona focused his "values" argument on
vulgarization of culture, post-election polls by the Pew Charitable
Trusts and a new survey released this week by NBC News and the Wall
Street Journal have shed some light on that lightening-rod question in
the National Election Pool exit poll. The "values" difference between
Republicans and Democrats is more about abortion and gay marriage than
it is about "Ren & Stempy" or "Will & Grace."

But if the red states are more moral than the blue states in other
ways, it's difficult to make that point quantitatively. In many of the
social pathologies, the blue states are in better shape than the red
ones. There are different ways of interpreting data, but a basic
analysis of census data makes this point.

For instance, the average percentage of births to unwed mothers is
slightly higher in red states than blue states. Washingtonpost.com
producer Kevin Hechtkopf did some number crunching and found that the
average number of births in unwed mothers was 33.2 per 100 in red
states compared to 31.2 in blue states.

And if divorce is an indicator of family values, the red states lose
out there as well. As blogger Andrew Sullivan pointed out recently,
the states with the highest rates of divorce per capita are all red
states, and the states with the lowest rates of divorce are blue
states.

Some will argue that none of these facts are evidence of hypocrisy,
that it's entirely possible that the liberal minority in red states is
responsible for the consumption of all the cultural trash and the
perpetrators of social pathology in those red states. Mathematically
possible? Yes. Probable? No.

Follow the Money
Spencer, the Mormon defense attorney in Utah County, said he couldn't
help but be struck by a larger point: Big corporate America -- a
staunch GOP ally -- was lining its pockets selling raunch to the
masses, including the red state nation.

"A lot of it's coming from Republicans," Spencer said, referring to
the corporate culprits who profit from smut. Spencer said he considers
himself a Republican.

It's almost impossible to get a handle on how much money corporate
America is reaping by peddling smut. General Motors Corp. is not eager
to brag about how many dirty movies it sold last year through a
subsidiary.

In the Utah County trial, Spencer asked the jury why a lone, small
business vendor like Peterman should be held to a higher standard than
the likes of W. Mitt Romney. At the time Romney was on the board of
Marriott International, which was making huge margins on piping porn
into hotel rooms. Currently, Romney is the Republican governor of
Massachusetts and his travels around the country have helped fuel
speculation that he might run for president in 2008.

Perhaps the most extensive mainstream media treatment on this subject
ran four years ago in The New York Times. In a 4,000-word
investigative opus, writer Timothy Egan connected the dots between
porn and big corporate profits:

"The General Motors Corporation, the world's largest company, now
sells more graphic sex films every year than does Larry Flynt, owner
of the Hustler empire. The 8.7 million Americans who subscribe to
DirecTV, a General Motors subsidiary, buy nearly $200 million a year
in pay-per-view sex films from satellite, according to estimates
provided by distributors of the films, estimates the company did not
dispute.

"EchoStar Communications Corporation, the No. 2 satellite provider,
whose chief financial backers include Mr. Murdoch, makes more money
selling graphic adult films through its satellite subsidiary than
Playboy, the oldest and best-known company in the sex business, does
with its magazine, cable and Internet businesses combined, according
to public and private revenue accounts by the companies.

"AT&T Corporation, the nation's biggest communications company, offers
a hard-core sex channel called the Hot Network to subscribers to its
broadband cable service. It also owns a company that sells sex videos
to nearly a million hotel rooms. Nearly one in five of AT&'s broadband
cable customers pay an average of $10 a film to see what the
distributor calls 'real, live all-American sex -- not simulated by
actors.'"

Egan's story is a bit dated -- corporate sell-offs and restructuring
have changed ownership of some of the companies on which he reported
-- but there's no evidence of a seismic shift in the adult
entertainment industry during the intervening years.

For instance, Ruport Murdoch, the controlling owner of News Corp. --
which owns both the conservative Fox News and the popular and
frequently salacious Fox TV -- continues to cash in. On one hand, Fox
News employs commentators who promote the connection between
Republicans and family values while other divisions of the company
profit from sexually explicit content.

In fact, Murdoch's Fox TV network is fighting a record-setting FCC
indecency fine for an episode of the now-canceled "Married by America"
(which featured whipped-cream-covered strippers at a bachelor party
and digitally obscured nudity) by arguing that the government should
not even be in the business of regulating decency on the public
airwaves.

"Indeed, the massive expansion of cable and satellite video
programming, together with the advent of the Internet, renders
obsolete the second-class treatment of broadcasters under the First
Amendment," the Fox FCC filing reads. "These technological and
marketplace changes make clear that regulation of indecency, which the
commission itself recognizes is constitutionally protected speech,
cannot possibly survive strict scrutiny review."

Last year, Murdoch won controlling interest in DirectTV from GM.

Of course pornography isn't the primary source of income for News
Corp. or any of the other companies mentioned here. But it is a
growing source. Multichannel News, an industry wag, wrote in June that
adult entertainment revenue on cable had grown from $263 million in
1998 to $609 million in 2002, the latest year for which figures were
available. Other articles on MSN, Insight on the News and Beliefnet
provide more information on the industry's growth.

No one argues that the vast sums of money that flow into the
Republican Party are based primarily on the self-interest of
protecting the ability to profit from that sort of material. But money
made off of pornography is finding its way into the Republican Party
via very wealthy donors.

The lodging and tourism industry -- like most major industries, with a
few exceptions such as entertainment and law -- has given a majority
of its money to the GOP since 1990. . Other than a few exceptions such
as Hyatt Corp, most of the large hotel chains give predominantly to
Republicans.

Since 2000, Murdoch and family members (all executives or shareholders
of the News Corp., Rupert's parent company) have contributed at least
$100,000 of their personal money to the Republican Party, its
candidates and right-leaning political action committees, according to
the nonprofit Center for Responsive Politics.

(To be fair, the News Corp. has given only a little more than half of
its $61,000 in corporate contributions to Republicans since 2000.)

Executives and officials at EchoStar have given prodigiously as well,
but the company has spread its money around between the parties, with
a heavy focus on contributions to congressional regulators of its
industry.

Since 1994, General Motors Corp. has given all of its $53,850 in
political contributions to the Republican Party.

This figure does not include the millions more spent by GM affiliates
and subsidiaries since the early 1990s, including Hughes Electronics
(the former parent of DirecTV), which has given 61 percent of its
$878,259 contributed since 1990 to the GOP and its candidates. (See
also: Automotive industry's top contributors to federal candidates and
parties)

AT&T, which sold its broadband cable system to Comcast a couple years
after the Egan story ran in The New York Times, has given 54 percent
of its $19,672,908 to Republicans. AT&T continues to own Liberty
Media, which is the principle owner of On Command, a Denver-based
company that is one of the two largest providers of pay-per-view
movies to hotel chains.

In Vanity Fair's annual list of top 50 "new establishment" information
age titans, the magazine sought to determine which of the presidential
candidates each person on the list supported. Of those that could be
determined, the field was split almost evenly between Bush and Kerry.
After the list was published, Viacom's Sumner Redstone, who had been
listed as a Kerry supported, announced he was supporting Bush. Viacom
owns MTV.

Redstone was listed as the third most powerful information age titan,
right behind Murdoch. Of the top 10 titans, four were primarily in the
business of media. And with Redstone's announcement, three of those
four -- Murdoch, Redstone and Comcast chairman and CEO Brian Roberts
-- were all Bush supporters. Barry Diller was the Kerry guy.

Another high-ranking media mogul was Time Warner CEO Richard Parsons.
Time Warner, of course, has vast holdings in cable television,
publications, online and music mediums. Parsons, a former assistant to
New York governor and U.S. vice president Nelson D. Rockefeller,
contributed a total of $2,000 to Bush in 2000 and 2004 and none to Al
Gore or John Kerry.

Marriage of Convenience
I vividly recall one of Bush's most popular stump speech lines from
the 2000 election: "My job will be to usher in the responsibility era,
a culture that will stand in stark contrast to the last few decades,
which has clearly said to America: If it feels good, do it. And if
you've got a problem, blame somebody else."

But this strategy conveniently exempts the corporate elite from those
high standards of responsibility.

In his buzzed-about book, "What's the Matter With Kansas," the liberal
writer Thomas Frank hypothesizes that today's winning GOP majority is
the culmination of a marriage of convenience between the GOP's
economic elite and social conservatives. The economic elite needs the
votes of the social conservatives to win elections. And the economic
elite needs to win elections to pursue the tax cuts and deregulation
they seek.

Frank believes that the economic conservatives convince the masses to
vote against their economic interests by creating an angry and
permanent cult of victimization that diverts attention from the elites
and pins all of the country's problems on the eponymous liberal
bogeyman. Even as the GOP continues to consolidate and hoard its
economic and political power, the Washington-based leadership and
strategists of the GOP mask its lack of progress in the culture war --
even as it accomplishes its goals of tax cuts and deregulation -- by
convincing the masses to rise up against their true oppressors, Sean
Penn, Harvard and the New York Times editorial page.

In the end, the Rupert Murdochs of the world could not exist without
the Utah Counties of the world. His political party needs their
voters. His businesses need their patronage.

While the debate over abortion and gay rights remains as relevant as
ever, the preponderance of evidence suggests that the larger
"cultural" values debate is as over-hyped as most of Don King's
fights.

Popular culture isn't popular because members of the "tax-hiking,
government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New
York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving left-wing freak
show" (to borrow a line from a campaign ad this year) are the only
customers. It's because there is an unquenched thirst for it, and the
corporate profiteers (who are members of and contributors to both
political parties) see a nationwide market for it.

Jeffrey J. Douglas, a Santa Monica, Calif.-based criminal defense
attorney and chairman of the Free Speech Coalition, an adult
entertainment advocacy and watchdog group, summed it up: "Any time you
can find a way to market sexual entertainment, rest assured that the
largest entities will make sure they can make money off of it and make
sure they have deniability."

Conservative syndicated columnist Armstrong Williams said most
conservative voters understand this but have rewarded the GOP with
their votes because of the sincere religiosity of President Bush and
his ability to reassure them that he shares their concerns about the
culture.

"I don't draw much of a distinction between corporate America and
Hollywood," Williams said. "It's not only Hollywood that produces this
filth, but corporate America too. They exploit it to take advantage of
it to make money off of it."

While Democrats will never be able to reach certain voters because of
issues such as abortion and gay rights, it cannot abdicate the values
debate, many party leaders argue. The political divide is narrow
enough that Democrats can win by peeling off a small percentage of
values voters by casting its own priorities in terms of morality and
by sending a message that they empathize with those concerned about
the vulgarization of the culture.

"You're not going to convince the hardcore to turn around, and you
shouldn't even try because you would compromise your own values," said
Al From of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. "You've got to
talk about giving something back. We did that in '92 with national
service. Clinton got criticized in 1996 for small bore ideas like the
V chip and school uniforms. But he made it clear that he was concerned
with how hard it is to raise kids today."

Clinton won a dozen states in his 1996 re-election that went to Bush this year.

© 2004 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive