Day: July 12, 2010

A Scientific Explanation for Tea Baggers and Birthers

Buck Banks

teabagger_signs_912_0cee6

“My mind’s made up, don’t confuse me with the facts.” Apparently, there’s more to that cute little expression than one might think. Indeed, when it comes to the way humans’ brains work, it seems to be an accurate description, according to some scientific inquiry conducted in 2005-06 — long before the rise of the Tea Party, and just about the time U.S. political discourse devolved into dismissive partisanship.

According to an article from the Boston Globe, facts can and often do, to use the scientific term, “backfire”:

In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

The ramifications of this for an erstwhile democracy like ours are serious, as was evidenced during last summer’s series of “townhall meetings.” You remember — the yelling, the screaming, the epithets, the shouting down of our elected officials who simply were trying to chat with constituents. Facts really become the immutable truth smashing into the immovable object when they collide with our beliefs:

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Goddard’s Political Dictionary Is a Hoot

Buck Banks

Got some time to kill online? You could do worse than visit Taegan Goddard’s Political Dictionary. It’s a work in progress — probably forever — and is crowd-sourced insofar as Goddard solicits entries from readers of his Political Wire blog.

The words and phrases are presented in no particular order, though a tag cloud does provide a modicum of organization. But the point is to kind of browse through the often obscure, very often sarcastic and extremely often cynical slang expressions that have grown out of the media and common usage.

Here’s an example:

full Ginsburg

The “full Ginsburg” refers to an appearance by one person on all five major Sunday-morning interview shows on the same day: This Week on ABC, Face the Nation on CBS, Meet the Press on NBC, State of the Union on CNN and Fox News Sunday.

The term is named for William Ginsburg, Monica Lewinsky’s lawyer during the Clinton scandal, who was the first person to accomplish this feat, on February 1, 1998.

Fox Deliberately Distorts DOJ Action on New Black Panthers Voting Incident

Jon Ponder
Roy Warden engaging in the burning of the Mexican flag, his signature political stunt

Hot on their success bringing down ACORN using false reporting and deceptive video editing, the Republican Party propagandists at Fox News are ginning up outrage among their viewers by deliberately misreporting the outcome of Department of Justice investigation into a purported voter intimidation incident on Election Day in 2008.

In its coverage of the DOJ response to a complaint against three members of the New Black Panther Party, an insignificant fringe group unrelated to the Black Panthers activist organization in the 1960s, Fox on-air personalities made the false claim that no sanctions were levied against the NBPP thugs and and lied again by stating that there was no precedent for the DOJ’s handling of the event.

The lies are demonstrably deliberate because, in the same segment, the Fox personalities quoted other sections from testimony by a DOJ official involved in the case in which both the DOJ sanction against NBP and the precedent case were discussed.

As with its trumped up case against ACORN — a nationwide nonprofit group that focused on housing for the poor as well as voter registration, and so was on the Republicans’ hit list for years — by distorting the facts, Fox is attempting to gin up racist resentment among its viewers, purporting that the African-American thugs were given a pass by the DOJ because both Pres. Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder are black.

Conversely, a much clearer case of overt preferential treatment based on race can be made in the precedent incident. In 2006, in Arizona, members of the Minutemen, a white supremacist, anti-immigrant militia-style group showed up at a predominantly Latino polling station brandishing a 9mm Glock automatic and bullying voters. The U.S. congressman from the district, Rep. Raul M. Grijalva, a Democrat, was among the voters who were subjected to heckling by the hooligans that day.

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Baptizing Jewish Holocaust Victims: The Splash Goes on in Mormon Temples

Helen Radkey

In May 1995, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) and a consortium of major Jewish groups signed a good faith agreement over the issue of posthumous baptisms of Jewish Holocaust victims by the LDS Church. The LDS Church willingly promised to curb the proxy baptisms of deceased Jews—especially Jewish Holocaust victims. Prior to 1995, Jewish Holocaust victims, whose names were taken from multiple Holocaust lists, had been baptized by the hundreds of thousands in Mormon temples.

Nothing much has changed during the past 15 years. The splash goes on. Many Mormons have behaved as though the agreement between Mormons and Jews does not exist. Since 1995, the names of multi-thousands of Jewish Holocaust victims have been submitted into the LDS pipeline by “overzealous” Mormons for Mormon temple rituals.

Jewish Holocaust victims — with the death camps they died in clearly listed on their on Mormon records — continue to be baptized in Mormon temples around the globe.

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