Balanced Budget craziness

There is a cute video up at the Cato Institute purporting to show how simple it would be to balance the federal budget without any tax increases and without allowing any of Bush’s tax cuts for the rich to expire next year.
Daniel Mitchell, the president of Cato, starts out in a folksy manner explaining that all we need to do is “go back” to the Constitution and only fund those federal programs specifically authorized in Aticle 1 Section 8 of our founding document.
And then “Voila!” No more budget deficit. Because what that would mean is that we would eliminate a huge swath of government departments and programs that were unknown or not deemed necessary 250 years ago. Mitchell rattles off the following departments that would be wiped out under this scenario:

• Agriculture
• Energy
• Housing and Urband Development
• Small Business Administration
• Education
• Transportation
• National Endowment for the Arts

The very fact that Mitchell is proposing such a course of action with a straight face and expecting people to take it seriously is very disturbing. That is because it takes a high level of willful ignorance to buy into that nonsense.
Turn back the clock to the horse-and-buggy era and all our problems would be solved, Mitchell is saying. Seriously.
Let’s just take Transportation as an example. What does he expect would happen? Do we shut down all the airports when we disband the FAA and fire all the air traffic controllers? What happens to the U.S. Highway System? Will each state set up tolls for non-state residents to drive on their roads? If coastal states have to pay for the upkeep and maintenance of sea ports will they then charge tariffs to inland states before goods and services are delivered? How long before our entire economy collapses in a jumble of feuding municipalities?
Or how about the Agriculture Department? No more ag subsidies? Sounds great, unless you live in a farm-belt state that relies heavily on these subsidies to get by, especially when the weather is uncooperative. And if the Ag Department is gone, what happens to the School Lunch Program which is financed by USDA? Tough luck kids, you go hungry now?
What about the research that USDA does on farm and livestock pests? How expensive will our grocery bills get once all this federal coordination goes away? Do you think the invisible hand of the market will step in and make everyone right?
This is crazy stuff that is not even worth anyone’s time to refute. If you think we can just wipe out all these federal programs, get a big fat tax cut in the mail, and then go on with our lives like nothing happened, they you clearly don’t understand what is at stake here.
We live in a very complex, highly evolved society that has gone through multiple decades of trial and error getting to where we are today. There is always room for budget cuts and operational efficiences that can eliminate waste and save money. But a radical overhaul of our system of government as the Cato wingnuts are advocating would shred our society and result in chaos and disaster.
There is no question that we have a big government that spends lots of money. We have a large welfare state and have had one for decades. But name a single country that doesn’t have a large welfare state where you would be willing to live today and raise a family. There are none that I know of and tiny little desert islands don’t count.

Obama-Reagan parallels

Republicans need to win 39 House seats this fall to take control of the House and a lot of political prognosticators think they can do it.
But even if the Republicans’ wildest dreams come true and they ride a tidal wave of voter resentment back to power in the House, it will ultimately mean very little.
President Obama may seem to be in a precarious position with his low poll numbers and his party possibly slipping into the minority, but he would still be better off than Ronald Reagan was at the same point in his presidency.
During the 1982 midterm elections, two years after Reagan swept to victory over former President Jimmy Carter, his poll numbers were almost identical to what Obama’s are right now. Furthermore, his party lost 27 seats during that election. But the big difference for Reagan, was that his party was already in the minority at that point. They lost 27 seats when they didn’t have that many to begin with. Republicans had 192 seats and fell all the way down to 166. By comparison, Democrats currently have 256 seats and even the most optimistic forecasts for Republican election prospects don’t have them dropping below 200. So, even in a worst case scenario for Obama, he will still have more allies in the House than Reagan did after his mid-term fiasco. And we all know what happened to Reagan two-years after that. He won one of the biggest landslide elections ever over a major Democratic establishment candidate.
Republicans will be lucky if they can even get one of their better candidates through the primary process which is likely to be controlled by the extremist Tea Party faction.
So while things might look bad for Obama in the short-term, his long-term prospects are likely to improve as the economy continues to recover.

Tax cuts explained

Racist lies from Mallard Fillmore

Here is another letter I sent to the San Antonio Express-News concerning the Mallard Fillmore strip. The last letter I sent was never published.

“People who adopt black children” are, according to the Mallard Fillmore strip in Monday’s San Antonio Express News, “mostly white”.
This is a blatant lie. When you look at all the transracial and transcultural adoptions of anykind in this country it comes to less than 14 percent, and the percentage of white families adopting black children is well below 10 percent which means that more than 90 percent of black children are adopted by black families.
But telling blatant lies is standard operating procedure for the rightwing Mallard Fillmore “comic” strip. The author was apparently annoyed that some liberal commentators pointed out that Glenn Beck’s latest rally in D.C. a few weeks ago was made up mostly of white people, so he decided that gave him permission to make a bunch of “jokes” riffing on racial stereotypes such as the false notion that black people don’t like to go bowling or cycling. But the kicker was the mean-spirited suggestion that black people leave it up to whites to adopt black children. That is absolutely false.
Whenever Bruce Tinsley, the far-rightwing author of the humor-free Mallard strip, tires of drawing grotesque caricatures of politicians and celebrities he does not like — with their eyes crossed and their noses and chins stretching off the page — Tinsley typically turns his wrath on postal workers, school teachers, labor unions, immigrants or any other group of people to serve as the scapegoats of his twisted ideology.
Why does the Express-News continue to publish garbage like Mallard Fillmore everyday?

Music cloud on the horizon

When I was in college in the mid-to-late 1980s, the digital music age was in its infancy. Compact discs or CDs - introduced in 1982 - were just starting to make an impact on the market although it would still be several years before I would buy my first CD player.
During this time, my friend Joe Johnson and I got into a discussion about digital music and the possibilities it entailed. Joe had an idea for a device he called the “digibox” which would essentially be a juke box with a hard drive containing far more music than could fit in a conventional juke box of the day.
I had a different idea. I figured why not build one giant computer hardrive and load up all the music that you could get permission for and then set it up like a cable TV subscription service. I imagined a firm that would run a cable into your house and plug it into your stereo. Then you would get a large catalog listing all the available music and some kind of interface device where you could type in the numbers of whatever songs you wanted to hear and Voila! instant music. For that, I figured a person could pay a monthly fee like getting HBO or something.
Unfortunately, neither Joe or I ever seriously pursued our ideas. Years later when the first iPod came out from Apple, I immediately recognized it as a mini-version of Joe’s Digibox.
So Joe’s idea turned out to be a huge success while I figured that mine was just a dead end that never would have got off the ground.
But just the other day I heard a story on NPR about a cloud-version of iTunes that is still in the planning stage and I was immediately reminded of my variation on the digibox idea.
I have a basic iPod which I love but which is woefully too small for my music collection (4GB). I used to have a diverse selection of Rock and Jazz music loaded up on it, but since I’ve recently been on a Classical music kick I have no room for anything else. So the idea of a cloud service where you could put all your digital music and have ready access to it at the push of a button is very intriguing and falls right in line with what I was thinking about back in college. Unfortunately, it appears that the music cloud is still a long ways off as the music industry tries to figure out how it can get the biggest possible cut from it.

The foul fowl's stench gets worse

The following is a Letter to the Editor that I sent to the San Antonio Express-News this morning...

The foul stench emitting from the Express-News comics page was even more odorous and offensive this past week as the “Mallard Fillmore” strip launched a vicious and nasty week-long attack on public school teachers to mark the beginning of the new school year.
Why the Express-News editors tolerate this nastiness is a mystery to me. Whenever the Doonesbury strip has anything even remotely controversial they are quick to yank it and run replacement strips. But I suppose a mean-spirited “comic” strip that mocks public school teachers as being stupid and lazy is perfectly fine with them.
The public school system is a favorite target of Bruce Tinsley, the far-rightwing author of the humor-free Mallard strip. Whenever he tires of drawing grotesque caricatures of politicians he does not like — with their eyes crossed and their noses and chins stretching off the page — Tinsley typically turns his wrath on postal workers, school teachers, labor unions, immigrants or any other group of people to serve as the scapegoats of his twisted ideology.
Real conservatives should be just as offended by Tinsley’s hateful diatribes as the people who get slapped in the face everytime they open their newspaper. They should demand that the Express-News follow the lead of its sister paper in Houston and dump the foul fowl and replace it with a conservative strip that does not bring shame and dishonor on their side of the political spectrum. Prickly City, which already runs in the E-N, is one example and there are many others.
I am not a teacher, nor am I employed by the school system or any part of the public sector. But I send my kids to public school and I respect the good work that their teachers do to give them an excellent education. It is too bad that our teachers have to be denigrated everyday in their daily newspaper’s so-called funny pages.

How awfully convenient for Rick Perry!

Former Houston Mayor Bill White will need a lot of votes out of Harris County if he is going to win a statewide race for governor. How incredibly convenient for Rick Perry that all the voting machines for Harris County would be destroyed in a mysterious fire just a few weeks before election day.
It boggles the mind.

How I despise judicial elections!!

It's election time again and the street corners are filling up with campaign signs mostly for the dozens of judicial races up for grabs.
And despite the fact that I am a voracious reader of the "news" and follow politics at all levels as a hobby, I have no clue as to who any of these people are.
Oh, sure, I could probably tell you which person is the incumbent and maybe even which party they come from. But that's about it. And that is pretty sad to base an election on. Then you consider that most people know even less about the candidates than I do and you realize it is nothing more than a name recognition contest which comes down to who can raise the most money and get the most campaign signs up, and who can saturate the airwaves with the most advertising.
Enough!
We have no business electing judges in the first place! Judges should be appointed and approved by the people we elect to represent us. Once appointed, judges should be completely independent and not beholden to any political party or interest group with the power to lavish or withhold reams of campaign cash.

We have too many elections as it is. The only people we should be electing in a democracy are the ones who actually "represent" us at some level of government: Presidents, Senators, Congressmen, state Reps. and senators, County judges and commissioners, Mayors and councilmembers, school board members and so forth.
But county clerks, treasurers, sheriffs, comptrollers, dog catchers and so forth should be appointed and/or hired by the local governing bodies, not elected by the citizenry.

Hounding celebrities, ignoring crimes

Why federal prosecutors are pushing a perjury case against former baseball star Roger Clemens is beyond me. I have little sympathy for prosecutors who pursue these high-profile, celebrity cases which have little, if any, value to the larger community. I feel the same way about the big, overblown Blagojevich trial in Chicago.
What possible difference would it make if they could actually prove to a jury, beyond any doubt, that Clemens lied in his testimony to Congress? Who cares either way? He’s retired from baseball already. Are they worried that he might get into the Hall of Fame? At this point, I really don’t care. Clemens’ reputation has already been so smeared and drug through the mud already that there is little chance he could win over enough votes to get into the HOF anyway.
Clemens is getting the same smarmy treatment that Pete Rose did. Rose had a gambling addiction that he refused to fess up to for years and years. But it never impacted his playing or any of his historic achievements in baseball and should therefore not be a consideration for his eligibility for the HOF.
I don’t know if steroids affected Clemens’ playing career or not. A lot of people suspect it did and they won’t take his denials as a definitive answer.
Meanwhile, Karl Rove is scot free after lying his rear off to Congress. Same with Dick Cheney and dozens of other Bush-era officials and Scooter Libby got himself a nice pardon.

At least he's not Ben Quayle

2010 Senate elections

The 2010 elections will undoubtedly see some victories for Republicans. There are at least four Democratic-held seats that are almost guaranteed to flip to Republicans for the next cycle: Arkansas, Indiana, Delaware and North Dakota.
North Dakota is a clear give-away to the Republicans. Byron Dorgan’s decision to step down now set up a cakewalk for popular Republican Gov. John Hoeven to waltz right into the seat with little opposition.
In Arkansas, Lt. Gov. Bill Halter’s primary loss to incumbent Blanche Lincoln pretty much sealed the fate of Democrats there. It is very likely that Halter would have lost as well, but Lincoln is almost a lock to go down to defeat.
In Indiana, Republican former Sen. Dan Coats is nearly a lock to take the seat being vacated by Democrat Evan Bayh. I had hope that U.S. Rep. Brad Ellsworth could put up a good fight, but the polls aren’t reflecting that. Unless something changes, he looks like toast.
And it is highly frustrating that a reliably Blue state such as Delaware is all set to replace Vice President Joe Biden in the Senate with a Republican. What a slap in the face! Thanks a lot, you Delaware losers! That’s almost as bad as Blue Massachussetts replacing Ted Kennedy with Republican Bozo Scott Brown.
The only semi-bright spot is that Republican Mike Castle will join Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins in the Almost-Non-Existent, Blink-And-You’ll-Miss-Them Moderate Wing of the Republican Tea Party.
In the other races, I am fairly confident that Democrats will be able to hold on in most cases and may even have an opportunity here or there for a pickup of their own.
I think Richard Blumenthal will have little trouble hanging on to the seat in Connecticut being vacated by Chris Dodd. I also think Michael Bennet’s chances of re-election in Colorado are now greatly improved thanks to the Tea Party nominating a wacky candidate in the Republican primary. The same goes for Harry Reid’s chances in Nevada.
What this will all mean, unfortunately, is that Republicans will have an even easier time filibustering everything under the sun and forcing the entire United States government to near gridlock. If something doesn’t give soon, I fear that our whole democratic system of government will bust apart at the seams.

Boy Scout Jamboree

My nephew Zach Wright of Crowley, La. is attending the Boy Scout National Jamboree outside of Washington, D.C.
Following is his first dispatch sent to his hometown newspaper.

Hello, my name is Zach Wright and I’m attending the Boy Scout National Jamboree. I’m a 14 year old freshman at Notre Dame High in Crowley, LA. I am the senior patrol leader in Troop 70 in Crowley. We are sponsored by the United Methodist Men of the First United Methodist Church of Crowley. With me is Eagle Scout Steven Dial, a senior at Crowley High and fellow troop member. For the Jamboree we are in troops representing the Evangeline Area Boy Scout Council. Altogether there are about 70 Scouters from our council and 45,000 Scouters at the jamboree.
The 2010 Boy Scout Jamboree occurs about every four years, so it has taken lots of planning.
The staff here is nice, and everything is going smoothly. There are 21 subcamps divided into four geographical regions of the U.S. Each subcamp has troops from various councils and each troop is divided into patrols. We’ve built a huge tent city with many campers. Fortunately our tents are big enough so that we could get two cots inside. Our lunches are provided as a bag lunch we can eat on the run, but our breakfast and dinners are cooked in the campsite by each patrol. We’re all eating the same menu, and the Jamboree staff distributes the food supplies. So far the best meal has been the July 28th. dinner of jambalaya.
Just like the staff has been planning and training for four years for this event, the scouts have spent months planning, preparing and training. We all took Emergency Preparedness Merit Badge and first aid lessons. While here we will attend a CPR/EAD training course and hope to set a world record for the largest ever held.
The variety of Scouts here is amazing. I’ve meet scouts from Japan, Canada, Egypt, Barbados, Sweden, Great Britain, South Korea and some Scouts from a little island in the Caribbean Sea near the coast of Venezuela. We’ve encouraged to mingle with the aid of a jamboree wide game of trading cards.
We each have a deck of 21 cards representing our subcamp. The idea is too meet and trade cards with a Scout from each subcamp. By the end of the Jamboree we should have a card from each subcamp. So far I have 6 out of the 20 other subcamps.
I’m also trading patches with other Scouts. Friends and family members have been collecting council strip patches from out of state for me for a year, so I have a head start on that collection, but I’ve added lots more!!!
While at jamboree, Scouts are trying to earn five rockers that will ever after be worn on their uniform around a National Jamboree patch. These rockers represent effort in core value areas of Scouting, and several requirements must be met in each area to earn a rocker.
The first rocker is for a 5k run/walk which was scheduled on the 30th. of July.
The second rocker is Duty to God. We’ve been leading grace at meals and sharing Scout devotionals in our patrols every evening. Attendance at a religious service, meeting our subcamp chaplin and visiting the exhibit table of our denomination are also required.
The third rocker is for participating in the outback centers. This area includes lots of fun aquatic activities like fishing, snorkeling, scuba diving, canoe races, kayak races and rafting. My favorite will be scuba because I have not been able to go to any of them yet, but I cannot wait.
The fourth rocker is for participating in the activities centers. These include a merit badge midway where professionals lead Scouts in earning any merit badge available. I’ve earned engineering, and I’ve seen a promotion for a merit badge called robotics (which I loved), but for now I am not working on any merit badges.
Other activity areas include an American Indian village display that is run by the Order of the Arrow (the Boy Scout honor society).
I can’t wait to see the pow wow dances. I’ve heard they’re amazing. There’s also a replica of the Brown Sea Island, the first Scout camp held in England by Lord Baden-Powel, founder of scouting. Scouts from Canada and Britain are running that display area.
The final rocker is for participating in the action centers. This area hosts friendly Scout competition in new areas for me including mountain boarding, trapshooting, muzzle-loaded gun shooting and a bikathlon – mountain biking and air rifle shooting.
Every evening there are area shows. So far we have seen the author of the book series “Eragon”. Tuesday, July 27th. many musical groups performed, but my favorite was a Trinidad and Tobago group. Wednesday, July 28th. another author talked to us about his “Alchemyst” series (which I started reading that night). Until next time from the Hill, Good bye.

A new blog

I've launched a new blog, entirely for my own edification, as I take part in a Bible study class at my church. We will be attempting to read the Bible through from cover to cover over the next year and I decided to start a blog where I could post my thoughts and commentaries as we go along. Here is the link:

Bible Reader

I've already got a jump start on Genesis and will keep plodding along as best I can.

Resisting the facts

From The Boston Globe

This explains a lot...

How facts backfire
Researchers discover a surprising threat to democracy: our brains

By Joe Keohane | July 11, 2010

It’s one of the great assumptions underlying modern democracy that an informed citizenry is preferable to an uninformed one. “Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1789. This notion, carried down through the years, underlies everything from humble political pamphlets to presidential debates to the very notion of a free press. Mankind may be crooked timber, as Kant put it, uniquely susceptible to ignorance and misinformation, but it’s an article of faith that knowledge is the best remedy. If people are furnished with the facts, they will be clearer thinkers and better citizens. If they are ignorant, facts will enlighten them. If they are mistaken, facts will set them straight.

In the end, truth will out. Won’t it?

Maybe not. Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. 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.

This bodes ill for a democracy, because most voters — the people making decisions about how the country runs — aren’t blank slates. They already have beliefs, and a set of facts lodged in their minds. The problem is that sometimes the things they think they know are objectively, provably false. And in the presence of the correct information, such people react very, very differently than the merely uninformed. Instead of changing their minds to reflect the correct information, they can entrench themselves even deeper.

“The general idea is that it’s absolutely threatening to admit you’re wrong,” says political scientist Brendan Nyhan, the lead researcher on the Michigan study. The phenomenon — known as “backfire” — is “a natural defense mechanism to avoid that cognitive dissonance.”

These findings open a long-running argument about the political ignorance of American citizens to broader questions about the interplay between the nature of human intelligence and our democratic ideals. Most of us like to believe that our opinions have been formed over time by careful, rational consideration of facts and ideas, and that the decisions based on those opinions, therefore, have the ring of soundness and intelligence. In reality, we often base our opinions on our beliefs, which can have an uneasy relationship with facts. And rather than facts driving beliefs, our beliefs can dictate the facts we chose to accept. They can cause us to twist facts so they fit better with our preconceived notions. Worst of all, they can lead us to uncritically accept bad information just because it reinforces our beliefs. This reinforcement makes us more confident we’re right, and even less likely to listen to any new information. And then we vote.

This effect is only heightened by the information glut, which offers — alongside an unprecedented amount of good information — endless rumors, misinformation, and questionable variations on the truth. In other words, it’s never been easier for people to be wrong, and at the same time feel more certain that they’re right.

“Area Man Passionate Defender Of What He Imagines Constitution To Be,” read a recent Onion headline. Like the best satire, this nasty little gem elicits a laugh, which is then promptly muffled by the queasy feeling of recognition. The last five decades of political science have definitively established that most modern-day Americans lack even a basic understanding of how their country works. In 1996, Princeton University’s Larry M. Bartels argued, “the political ignorance of the American voter is one of the best documented data in political science.”

On its own, this might not be a problem: People ignorant of the facts could simply choose not to vote. But instead, it appears that misinformed people often have some of the strongest political opinions. A striking recent example was a study done in the year 2000, led by James Kuklinski of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He led an influential experiment in which more than 1,000 Illinois residents were asked questions about welfare — the percentage of the federal budget spent on welfare, the number of people enrolled in the program, the percentage of enrollees who are black, and the average payout. More than half indicated that they were confident that their answers were correct — but in fact only 3 percent of the people got more than half of the questions right. Perhaps more disturbingly, the ones who were the most confident they were right were by and large the ones who knew the least about the topic. (Most of these participants expressed views that suggested a strong antiwelfare bias.)

Studies by other researchers have observed similar phenomena when addressing education, health care reform, immigration, affirmative action, gun control, and other issues that tend to attract strong partisan opinion. Kuklinski calls this sort of response the “I know I’m right” syndrome, and considers it a “potentially formidable problem” in a democratic system. “It implies not only that most people will resist correcting their factual beliefs,” he wrote, “but also that the very people who most need to correct them will be least likely to do so.”

What’s going on? How can we have things so wrong, and be so sure that we’re right? Part of the answer lies in the way our brains are wired. Generally, people tend to seek consistency. There is a substantial body of psychological research showing that people tend to interpret information with an eye toward reinforcing their preexisting views. If we believe something about the world, we are more likely to passively accept as truth any information that confirms our beliefs, and actively dismiss information that doesn’t. This is known as “motivated reasoning.” Whether or not the consistent information is accurate, we might accept it as fact, as confirmation of our beliefs. This makes us more confident in said beliefs, and even less likely to entertain facts that contradict them.

New research, published in the journal Political Behavior last month, suggests that once those facts — or “facts” — are internalized, they are very difficult to budge. In 2005, amid the strident calls for better media fact-checking in the wake of the Iraq war, Michigan’s Nyhan and a colleague devised an experiment in which participants were given mock news stories, each of which contained a provably false, though nonetheless widespread, claim made by a political figure: that there were WMDs found in Iraq (there weren’t), that the Bush tax cuts increased government revenues (revenues actually fell), and that the Bush administration imposed a total ban on stem cell research (only certain federal funding was restricted). Nyhan inserted a clear, direct correction after each piece of misinformation, and then measured the study participants to see if the correction took.

For the most part, it didn’t. The participants who self-identified as conservative believed the misinformation on WMD and taxes even more strongly after being given the correction. With those two issues, the more strongly the participant cared about the topic — a factor known as salience — the stronger the backfire. The effect was slightly different on self-identified liberals: When they read corrected stories about stem cells, the corrections didn’t backfire, but the readers did still ignore the inconvenient fact that the Bush administration’s restrictions weren’t total.

It’s unclear what is driving the behavior — it could range from simple defensiveness, to people working harder to defend their initial beliefs — but as Nyhan dryly put it, “It’s hard to be optimistic about the effectiveness of fact-checking.”

It would be reassuring to think that political scientists and psychologists have come up with a way to counter this problem, but that would be getting ahead of ourselves. The persistence of political misperceptions remains a young field of inquiry. “It’s very much up in the air,” says Nyhan.

But researchers are working on it. One avenue may involve self-esteem. Nyhan worked on one study in which he showed that people who were given a self-affirmation exercise were more likely to consider new information than people who had not. In other words, if you feel good about yourself, you’ll listen — and if you feel insecure or threatened, you won’t. This would also explain why demagogues benefit from keeping people agitated. The more threatened people feel, the less likely they are to listen to dissenting opinions, and the more easily controlled they are.

There are also some cases where directness works. Kuklinski’s welfare study suggested that people will actually update their beliefs if you hit them “between the eyes” with bluntly presented, objective facts that contradict their preconceived ideas. He asked one group of participants what percentage of its budget they believed the federal government spent on welfare, and what percentage they believed the government should spend. Another group was given the same questions, but the second group was immediately told the correct percentage the government spends on welfare (1 percent). They were then asked, with that in mind, what the government should spend. Regardless of how wrong they had been before receiving the information, the second group indeed adjusted their answer to reflect the correct fact.

Kuklinski’s study, however, involved people getting information directly from researchers in a highly interactive way. When Nyhan attempted to deliver the correction in a more real-world fashion, via a news article, it backfired. Even if people do accept the new information, it might not stick over the long term, or it may just have no effect on their opinions. In 2007 John Sides of George Washington University and Jack Citrin of the University of California at Berkeley studied whether providing misled people with correct information about the proportion of immigrants in the US population would affect their views on immigration. It did not.

And if you harbor the notion — popular on both sides of the aisle — that the solution is more education and a higher level of political sophistication in voters overall, well, that’s a start, but not the solution. A 2006 study by Charles Taber and Milton Lodge at Stony Brook University showed that politically sophisticated thinkers were even less open to new information than less sophisticated types. These people may be factually right about 90 percent of things, but their confidence makes it nearly impossible to correct the 10 percent on which they’re totally wrong. Taber and Lodge found this alarming, because engaged, sophisticated thinkers are “the very folks on whom democratic theory relies most heavily.”

In an ideal world, citizens would be able to maintain constant vigilance, monitoring both the information they receive and the way their brains are processing it. But keeping atop the news takes time and effort. And relentless self-questioning, as centuries of philosophers have shown, can be exhausting. Our brains are designed to create cognitive shortcuts — inference, intuition, and so forth — to avoid precisely that sort of discomfort while coping with the rush of information we receive on a daily basis. Without those shortcuts, few things would ever get done. Unfortunately, with them, we’re easily suckered by political falsehoods.

Nyhan ultimately recommends a supply-side approach. Instead of focusing on citizens and consumers of misinformation, he suggests looking at the sources. If you increase the “reputational costs” of peddling bad info, he suggests, you might discourage people from doing it so often. “So if you go on ‘Meet the Press’ and you get hammered for saying something misleading,” he says, “you’d think twice before you go and do it again.”

Unfortunately, this shame-based solution may be as implausible as it is sensible. Fast-talking political pundits have ascended to the realm of highly lucrative popular entertainment, while professional fact-checking operations languish in the dungeons of wonkery. Getting a politician or pundit to argue straight-faced that George W. Bush ordered 9/11, or that Barack Obama is the culmination of a five-decade plot by the government of Kenya to destroy the United States — that’s easy. Getting him to register shame? That isn’t.

}"Obama snub" email debunked

I got this video e-mailed to me today by my brother-in-law because he likes to needle me about Obama.



And here is the text of the email that accompanied the video (NOT by my brother-in-law since he just forwarded it):

I guess to some people you cannot bow...
Keep your eye on Obama's hand and face
Watch this 10-second video where a lineup of leading Russians refuse to shake his hand. Did you see this on ABC,
CBS, NBC, CNN or MSNBC? NO!
This is "hard ball" Soviet Style. After the third handshake refusal,,,it becomes obvious. The facial expression is priceless.
"I guess we're no longer in Chicago."
And, how in the world did Katie Couric, Charlie Gibson, Diane Sawyer et al, miss this? If it had been Bush, think the media would cover it??
Anyone ever seen a Head of State snubbed like this? It speaks volumes.
Maybe Obama should apologize for the U.S. some more. It sure seems to be working great so far!

OK, then.
But the problem with the video, it seems is that it does not show Obama being snubbed by Russians at all. In fact, in the video it is the American delegation that is not shaking the president's hand - and for good reason! Because he is introducing them to the Russian leader and gesturing with his hand - not trying to shake their hands.

Snopes does a good job debunking this particular email. They also show an unedited video from the meeting in which you see Obama enter the room and immediatley shake hands with all the members of the Russian delegation.

Another irony is that while the email claims you did not see this on MSNBC among other stations - the video is, in fact, a close up of a broadcast off of MSNBC which you can see if you search "Obama snub" on Youtube.

OK, so I understand why people fall for this stuff. It's because it shows them or tells them something that they WANT to believe and therefore they eagerly grasp it.
But who is behind emails like this? Whe makes this stuff up? It seems unlikely that it was a benign mistake. Rather, based on the careful editing and zooming in to obscure the context, they must have known that it was B.S. And yet, they put it out anyway. Why? Were they paid to do so? It would seem that there is whole cottage industry out there churning this stuff out to feed the innumberable outlets for rightwing media - including the near monopoly on Talk Radio and the dozens of rightwing shows on cable news channels - particulary phony Faux News.

King James abdicates his throne

LeBron James' cowardly decision to turn tail and run out of Cleveland should make it clear to everyone that he is not and never will be as good as Michael Jordan or dozens of other past NBA stars as well.
What James is telling us by going to Miami is that he doesn't think he is good enough to win a title by himself and needs to stand on the shoulders of Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh.
While I'm sure the decision will make lots of people in Florida happy, I think it has seriously tarnished LeBron's national reputation. He can't even use the excuse of money because he would have been paid more - $30 million more - to stay in Cleveland. But that would have also required him to do more work and take on more responsibility for pulling a team together that can win a championship. When that didn't happen this year, LeBron gave up. Now, he will have no excuses, but likewise he will receive a lot less credit if his new superstar team fails to meet gargantuan expectations.
I know that I, for one, will be rooting for LeBron and the Miami Heat to fall flat on their asses. I now have a team that I can dislike even more than the Lakers.
Maybe now the sports world will start to give more credit to Tim Duncan, who quietly and efficiently led his team to four championships without the spectacle of needing to bring in two other top-tier draft picks.

A good graph to keep in mind

Defining the modern "conservative" movement

Andrew Sullivan has a bleak assessment of our current political discourse.

When Andrew Breitbart offers $100,000 for a private email list-serv archive, essentially all bets are off. Every blogger or writer who has ever offered an opinion is now on warning: your opponents will not just argue against you, they will do all they can to ransack your private life, cull your email in-tray, and use whatever material they have to unleash the moronic hounds of today's right-wing base.

Yes, the Economist was right. This is not about transparency, or hypocrisy. It's about power. And when you are Andrew Breitbart, power is all that matters. There is not a whit of thoughtfulness about this, not an iota of pretense that it might actually advance the conversation about how to deal with, say, a world still perilously close to a second Great Depression, a government that is bankrupt, two wars that have been or are being lost, an energy crisis that is also threatening our planet's ecosystem, and a media increasingly incapable of holding the powerful accountable.

Meanwhile, the GOP leaders, having done all they can to destroy a presidency by obstructing everything and anything he might do or have done to address the crippling problems bequeathed him by his predecessor, are now also waging a scorched earth battle to prevent the working poor from having any real access to affordable health insurance.

This is what the right now is: no solutions, just anger, paranoia, insecurity and partisan hatred.

Smokey Joe Barton apologizes to BP

Movie making story followup

When I was working as a reporter for a chain of weekly newspapers in Connecticut in the early 1990s, I had the opportunity to write many interesting stories. One that I recently dug out of my files that was published in the April 23, 1992 edition of the Durham Gazette was about a New York film crew that came to Middlefield, Conn. to do some on-location filming for an independent feature-length movie.
It was a low-budget production (about $200,000) and involved mostly no-name actors and a writer/director fresh out of film school by the name of Deirdre Fishel. The working title of the film was “Maya” and I was told that it was the story of a young woman whose life and career had stalled until she met a charming vagabond named Joe on a New York subway. He convinced her to escape with him to the country. Thus the need for on-location filming at Happy Acres Resort, a small collection of rental cabins in a remote, wooded area outside of the small community of Middlefield (near Durham).
My story focused mainly on the “gypsy” lifestyle of the film crew and their reaction to the scenic and rustic environment of rural Connecticut compared to New York City. I talked with the associate producer who had scouted the location and several low-level crew members including a “2nd electric” and a “2nd grip.”
It was raining and sleeting for much of the time that the film crew was in town and they did a lot of the filming inside the cabins while the crewmembers huddled under the eaves trying to stay warm and dry.
I never knew what happened with the movie after they left. I kind of assumed that it did not get a theatrical release. But recently I decided to dig up the old story and using the magic of the Internet I discovered that I was wrong. The film actually did get a theatrical release in 1994 under the name “Risk.” It was entered into the Sundance Film Festival and even got a somewhat decent review in the New York Times (Oct. 5, 1994).
What kind of shocked me, however, was that the film is described as an “erotic thriller.” So that’s what they were doing in the cabins with the windows all covered with blankets! I should have known. The associate producer told me at the time that “We needed someplace that was isolated so we can do our work undisturbed and also so we won’t bother others.”
OK, then.
The film is described on the web today as “a powerful drama about an artist who enters into a turbulent love affair with a troubled and unpredictable young man.” The cover of the video on Amazon is a bit too risque for me to post on my blog.
The star of the film, Karen Sillas, went on to do a few more low-budget movies before getting her “big break” in television. She has since appeared in a number of popular TV series in bit roles including CSI, The Sopranos, and a recurring role in the TNT crime drama “Wanted”. The director went on to do several documentary films and then joined the faculty at the New School University in New York.