Day: September 15, 2014
Ballot Measure to Break California Into Six States Fails
6
Number of states a proposed ballot measure would have carved California into except it failed to qualify for the November 2016 ballot Friday after election officials determined that backers did not collect enough valid signatures, the Sacramento Bee reports.
In Praise of Bill Clinton
In the art of politics he’s Michelangelo, and in the science of politics he is Einstein. He follows political results like a baseball junkie follows box scores. Because he has campaigned in so many places, he has absorbed and integrated millions of data points, yet can assemble them into a narrative that folks can follow.
— Paul Begala, quoted by Businessweek, on Bill Clinton.
Palin Apologizes for Losing
I owe America a global apology.
— Sarah Palin, quoted by the Huffington Post, for being on the losing ticket for the 2008 presidential election.
Palin’s Drunken Brawl Finally Gives Her the Publicity She Deserves
In the six years since 2008, when she lost the election and failed to become vice president of the United States, and the five years since she abruptly quit her job as governor of Alaska midway through her first term, Sarah Palin has devoted her life to nothing other than a relentless pursuit of the spotlight.
Palin practices ‘pull my finger politics,’ a tactic in which she makes a remark so carefully crafted to evoke outrage that the media can’t resist reporting it, which causes a big stink
Like Newt Gingrich and Ann Coulter, to name just two, Palin has become a practitioner of what could be called “pull my finger” politics. The tactic is simple. Palin et al make a carefully crafted outrageous comment, essentially saying to the media, “Pull my finger — no, really, pull my finger.” The media falls for it by reporting the incendiary remark, which, of course, evokes a firestorm of criticism — which is to say, a big stink — that persists through multiple news cycles during which everyone is talking about nothing else but guess who.
A recent example occurred in May when Palin addressed a meeting of gun nuts in Texas. Speaking to a lunchtime crowd, the woman whom Sen. McCain chose to be a septuagenarian’s heartbeat away from the world’s largest nuclear arsenal compared Christian baptism to torture. Complaining that liberals coddle terrorists, she proclaimed that were she the president, “they would know that waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists.”
As intended, this nasty bit of right-wing sacrilege evoked outrage, and not just from liberals, like the National Religious Campaign against Torture, but also from troglodytes at the American Conservative, one of whom described her speech as, “just witless, red-meat blathering, delivered in that nasal whine of hers that makes it sound like she’s chewing wads of tinfoil.”
Ouch.
Trust in All Three Branches of Government at or Near Record Lows
6 points
Amount Americans’ trust in the legislative branch fell this year to a new low of 28%, according to Gallup. Americans’ trust in each of the three branches of the federal government is at or near the lows in Gallup’s trends, dating back to the early 1970s. Trust in the executive branch dropped eight points, to 43%, and trust in the judicial branch, at 61%, is also the lowest measured to date.
What Are You Searching For? It Depends on How Much Money You Have
If you’re not dirt poor, with few prospects for changing your situation, it’s hard to consider how much of your thought would be devoted to grim subjects. Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir illustrated the concept and the myth of the so-called cycle of poverty in their recent book, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much. Being stuck in perpetual crisis mode is less about wasting your food stamps buying lobster, the authors say, and more about what they call lack of bandwidth.
It works like this. When you’re laying in bed all night wondering how you’re going to pay your child’s daycare provider if you put tires on the car, but if you don’t get tires it’s just a matter of time before you have a flat and can’t get to work and then you’ll lose hours of pay and possibly your whole job…let’s just say you don’t have a lot of energy left for healthy meal planning, shopping, and preparation. The authors call this a “bandwidth tax” on the poor that America’s better off just don’t have to pay.
Leonhardt: The dark side of religion is of special interest: “Antichrist,” “hell” and “rapture” make the top 10 search terms
Now Google, courtesy of The New York Times’ David Leonhardt, is giving a stark glimpse into the mindsets of those on the losing end of income inequality. The search terms of poor people show that they and the well-off live in different countries, and possibly on different planets.
