Month: June 2012
Extreme Times Call for Extremist Brains
A researcher has discovered a possible cause for the rise of the Tea Party and the Republican Party’s increasing swing toward the far right — they have bad brains. No, really, it’s science.
According to the Telegraph:
So what has this got to do with science? Studies suggest that on average, and even across national boundaries, people who opt for the Left, and people who opt for the Right, tend to be identifiable not only by their stated ideologies but by their personalities and quantifiable psychological traits.
Not Everyone in Florida is an Asshole
In fact, Sen. Bill Nelson’s a pretty stand-up guy.
Eric Holder Smacks Down Texas Senator at Hearing, Inspires Newfound Admiration
I’ve never been a big fan of Eric Holder — to be fair, most attorneys general are not inspiring figures. But after reading his response to Texas Sen. John Cornyn during the bogus, purely political “Fast and Furious” hearing this week, I have to say I like Holder’s chops:
What If Obama Pulled a Reagan with Syria?
Imagine if Obama, taking a cue from Reagan, were to travel to the Syrian border & proclaim: ‘Mr. Assad, stop murdering #Syria’s people!’
— The Boston Globe’s Jeff Jacoby, posting on Twitter.
Fewer Americans Investing in Stock market
46.4%
The proportion of American households invested in domestic stocks in 2011, down from a high of 53% a decade earlier, according to the Investment Company Institute. The findings reflect a movement away from stocks after decades of rising participation in the market by small investors.
Big Media Can’t Be Bothered to Keep Up with the Romney Campaign’s Rovian ‘Blizzard of Lies’ Strategy
If Mitt Romney wins the presidency in November it will be because he has adopted the George W. Bush/Karl Rove “reality creation” strategy, wherein the candidate/elected official and his or her surrogates tell so many lies, day in and day out, that the overpaid but beleaguered national political media can’t be bothered to keep up.
Just as there was in the Bush years, a cottage industry is coalescing on the Interwebs around the mission of tracking the Romney team’s “blizzard of lies” strategy with fact checking and lie listings. Media Matters does a good job, of course, and there’s Factcheck.org and right-leaning Politifact, but check out Romney the Liar, at Blogspot, for starters. Here are a few other sources:
Romney’s Rules for Lying
Believe it or not, there is a method to Mitt Romney’s mendacity. Xpostfactoid has come up with 12 rules (so far) for Romney’s lying. Here are three:
1. Context doesn’t matter. Anything you say I may use against you, e.g., by making it sound like you said the opposite…
4. When confronted directly with past positions that seem to contradict current ones, I may so thoroughly bend the positions back against each other that none shall be able to penetrate my paradoxes…
10. I may lie with impunity to the American people for months and years — and be rewarded with the presidency.
The full list is here.
Effect of GOP’s European Style Austerity on Public Sector Employment in a Single Graph
Ezra Klein at Washington Post’s Wonkblog:
In the graph atop this post, I ran the numbers on total government employment after the 1981, 1990, 2001 and 2008 recessions. I made government employment on the eve of the recession equal to “1,” so what you’re seeing is total change in the ensuing 54 months, which is how much time has elapsed since the start of this recession.
As you can see, government employment tends to rise during recessions, helping to cushion their impact. But with the exception of a spike when we hired temporary workers for the decennial census, it’s fallen sharply during this recession.
Note that a Republican was president after the 1981, 1990 and 2000 recessions. Public-sector austerity looks a lot better to conservatives when they’re out of power than when they’re in it.
