Political reforms and electoral campaigns can sail or fail based largely on how they are marketed.

In the 1994 election, Newt Gingrich and his fellow Republicans in Congress successfully rallied behind the Contract With America.

This year, German Chancellor Angela Merkel won an election that steered her party into a multi-party coalition whose centerpiece initiative is called the "beer coaster reform."

This proposal has nothing to do with where a glass of lager rests. It's about simplifying (and reducing) Germany's income tax rates. Supporters' notion is that a tax return should be short enough that it could fit on a beer coaster.

That definitely would be one very small tax form.

Ever since Harvard professor Robert Putnam wrote the book Bowling Alone, there has been much debate and angst over the perceived lack of "social capital" in America. That term is shorthand for volunteerism and involvement.

Putnam pointed to declining membership in unions, PTAs and the Boy Scouts, as well as a dip in church attendance, to make his case that Americans have disengaged from their local communities.

Although it's hard to argue with Putnam's raw numbers, there are others who contend that the spirit of volunteerism is alive and well in the U.S.

Edelman's Marilynn Mobley is one of them. In this post on the firm's "Baby Boomer Insights" blog, Mobley notes that in the wake of floods that recently ravaged Atlanta and the surrounding region, large numbers of volunteers have stepped forward:

Volunteers are spilling forward, eagerly looking for ways to help neighbors. And leading the way are boomers, whose reputation for volunteering continues, despite the fact that many face their own issues brought on by this rising tide called a recession.

The evidence of vigorous volunteerism isn't just anecdotal.  Mobley points to this national report, which reveals a high level of involvement by baby-boomers in their communities. She writes:

The volunteer rate for Baby Boomers remained relatively stable from 2007 to 2008 despite an increase in unemployment, a rise in home foreclosures and the largest decline in charitable giving in more than 40 years.

Perhaps volunteerism hasn't fallen as much as the pessimists argue. Maybe, instead, volunteerism is simply taking different forms today.  For many people, it seems to be more of an "ad hoc" activity, as opposed to something that is done mainly through a specific club or social group.

Data scientists who work for Facebook are using the social-networking site to create a Gross National Happiness Index (GNHI) that measures the collective happiness of Americans at various points in time.

A member of the Facebook data team explains how it works:

... (the index) measures how happy people on Facebook are from day-to-day by looking at the number of positive and negative words they're using when updating their status. When people in their status updates use more positive words — or fewer negative words — then that day as a whole is counted as happier than usual.

... no one at Facebook actually reads the status updates in the process of doing this research; instead, our computers do the word counting after all personally identifiable information has been removed.

... (The GNHI) shows two remarkably unhappy days. The lowest was Jan. 22, 2008, which was the day the Asian stock market crashed and coincidentally the same day as the tragic death of actor Heath Ledger. The recent death of cultural icon Michael Jackson on June 25, 2009, came in as the second least happy day in the past two years.

So, if you post a status update on Facebook with words like "stinks," "bummer," "sucks" or "lousy," you may be dragging down the nation's GNHI.

How's that for pressure?

The financial pressures that have closed or squeezed newspapers and magazines in recent years largely come down to one thing: the "advertising recession."

Last month, Bloomberg News reported that U.S. advertising expenditures fell by 14% over the first half of the year.

Is a turnaround on the horizon?

It's hard to know, but at least there is a sign that web advertising is growing. Google reports that its Internet advertising business picked up steam during the 3rd quarter of this year.

Even during the first half of this year, Internet advertising did not take nearly as severe a hit as newspaper advertising revenue did. Yet an increase in advertising activity in any venue is seen as a hopeful economic sign.

Ironically, even daily newspapers have come to rely more heavily on their web-based ads. It has been reported, for example, that the L.A. Times earns enough revenue from its website to fund its newsroom budget. Of course, that leaves circulation and a few other departments uncovered.

This recession seems to have changed the employer-worker relationship in ways that will last for many years -- in ways that won't put a smile on employees' faces.

The Wall Street Journal reports on a survey revealing that 2 out of 3 large companies that have cut employees' health-care benefits don't plan to restore them to pre-recession levels.

In addition, these large companies are in no hurry to return 401-k benefits to the levels that existed before the economic downturn.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos holds the Kindle

The news cycle is filled with evidence that the book-publishing and book-selling sector is rapidly changing in ways that could pose a stiff challenge to one of the major e-retailers. Wal-Mart's price war over best-sellers isn’t the only development that Amazon.com has to worry about. According to Wired:

If you just ordered a Kindle, stop reading now or you’re in for a giant dose of buyer’s remorse. Barnes and Noble unveiled a new e-book reader called ‘Nook’, and it is hot, both inside and out.

Nook looks a lot like Amazon’s white plastic e-book reader, only instead of the chiclet-keyboard there is a color multitouch screen, to be used as a keyboard or to browse books, cover-flow style. The machine runs Google’s Android OS and it will have wireless capability from AT&T.

The $260 Nook–same price as the Kindle 2-is expected to be on sale at the end of November.

As if that weren't enough, CNet reports on another potential threat that Amazon should have on its radar screen:

An initiative in the works from the nonprofit Internet Archive to centralize the electronic distribution of commercially viable books could upend the publishing industry and declaw Amazon.com, an industry analyst said.

On Monday, the Internet Archive, which among other things has been working for some time to digitize countless numbers of public domain texts, showed the first public look at its BookServer project, an initiative it dubs, "The future of books."