kottke.org posts about politics
Jeff Smith was a Missouri State Senator who ended up in jail for a year; here’s an account of his experience in the klink.
Before I was shown my new digs, the staff processed me. That meant going repeatedly through the standard battery of questions. The third questioner finished and sent me to a heavyset woman.
“Height and weight?” she asked.
“5’6”, 120.”
She examined my slight frame and frowned. “Education level?”
I winced. “Ph.D.”
She shot me a skeptical look. “Last profession?”
“State Senator.”
She rolled her eyes. “Well, I’ll put it down if you want. If you wanna play games, play games. We got ones who think they’re Jesus Christ, too.”
Well, from political life anyway.
For years, the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader, has spoken of his desire to cede political authority, or “retire,” as he has sometimes put it. But in Thursday’s speech he made it official, announcing that he would propose the change during the session of the Tibetan Parliament in exile that begins next week in Dharamsala, India.
“My desire to devolve authority has nothing to do with a wish to shirk responsibility,” he said, according to a prepared text of his speech. “It is to benefit Tibetans in the long run.”
Retired perhaps, but still tweeting.
The political soundbite has gotten progressively shorter over the past few decades.
A professor at the University of California had just published research showing that the length of the average TV sound bite had dropped dramatically, from 43 seconds in the 1968 presidential election to a mere nine seconds in the 1988 election. And this drop had led to lots of hand-wringing — from professors, from journalists, and from politicians themselves. “If you couldn’t say it in less than 10 seconds,” Michael Dukakis complained about the previous campaign, “it wasn’t heard because it wasn’t aired.”
It’s currently just under eight seconds…which, perhaps not coincidentally, is about how long it would take someone to speak a text or tweet.
Matthew Ericson tracked down the first national election map published in the NY Times; it showed William McKinley’s victory over William Jennings Bryan.
The speed with which the results made it into print boggles the mind given the technology of the day (especially considering that in the last few elections in the 2000s, with all of the technology available to us, there have been a number of states that we haven’t been able to call in the Wednesday paper).
(thx, tyson)
Unless you’re from the UK (or watched Spitting Image and all sorts of other British comedies on PBS as an impressionable youth in Wisconsin), the observations of Parliamentary sketchwriter Simon Hoggart about the prime ministers he has covered might be too inside baseball, but I couldn’t help sharing this Thatcher anecdote about her unwitting skill with double entendre:
But Thatcher saved the best of all for her victory tour of the Falkland Islands. She was taken to inspect a large field gun, basically a ride-on lawnmower with a barrel several feet long. It was on a bluff, overlooking a plain on which another Argentine invasion might one day materialise. She admired the weapon, and the soldier manning it asked if she would like to fire a round.
“But mightn’t it jerk me off?” she replied. Chris Moncrieff of the Press Association, who was covering the visit, recorded the manful struggle of the soldier to keep his face, indeed his whole body, straight.
Actually, all the Thatcher stories are quite good. (thx, tom)
Remember the whole thing Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill with the pubic hair on the can of Coke and the Supreme Court hearings and all that? Me neither. But Clarence Thomas’ wife does; she left a voicemail on Anita Hill’s work phone asking her to apologize for what she did to her husband.
“Good morning Anita Hill, it’s Ginni Thomas,” it said. “I just wanted to reach across the airwaves and the years and ask you to consider something. I would love you to consider an apology sometime and some full explanation of why you did what you did with my husband.” Ms. Thomas went on: “So give it some thought. And certainly pray about this and hope that one day you will help us understand why you did what you did. O.K., have a good day.”
That’s either really passive aggressive, straight-up batshit insane, or the oxycontin talking. Ms. Thomas referred to the call as “extending an olive branch”, which I guess is true if she meant that the branch was stripped of leaves and the end sharpened to a point.
Long interview with Barack Obama in Rolling Stone. Most of it is politics, but they also discussed music.
My iPod now has about 2,000 songs, and it is a source of great pleasure to me. I am probably still more heavily weighted toward the music of my childhood than I am the new stuff. There’s still a lot of Stevie Wonder, a lot of Bob Dylan, a lot of Rolling Stones, a lot of R&B, a lot of Miles Davis and John Coltrane. Those are the old standards.
A lot of classical music. I’m not a big opera buff in terms of going to opera, but there are days where Maria Callas is exactly what I need.
Thanks to Reggie [Love, the president’s personal aide], my rap palate has greatly improved. Jay-Z used to be sort of what predominated, but now I’ve got a little Nas and a little Lil Wayne and some other stuff, but I would not claim to be an expert. Malia and Sasha are now getting old enough to where they start hipping me to things. Music is still a great source of joy and occasional solace in the midst of what can be some difficult days.
Jeffrey Goldberg visited with Fidel Castro recently and has two posts on his Atlantic blog about his meetings with the former Cuban head of state: part one and part two.
After this first meeting, I asked Julia to explain the meaning of Castro’s invitation to me, and of his message to Ahmadinejad. “Fidel is at an early stage of reinventing himself as a senior statesman, not as head of state, on the domestic stage, but primarily on the international stage, which has always been a priority for him,” she said. “Matters of war, peace and international security are a central focus: Nuclear proliferation climate change, these are the major issues for him, and he’s really just getting started, using any potential media platform to communicate his views. He has time on his hands now that he didn’t expect to have. And he’s revisiting history, and revisiting his own history.”
This is substantial reporting but I’ll admit my favorite line was:
I’ve never seen someone enjoy a dolphin show as much as Fidel Castro enjoyed the dolphin show.
Because of Goldberg’s reportage on Castro’s remarks regarding anti-Semitism, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez (and strong critic of Israel) announced yesterday that he would meet with Venezuela’s Jewish leaders. Someone get Errol Morris down to Cuba to make a sequel to his film about Robert McNamara. The Fog of Cold War perhaps? (via @kbanderson)
Vanity Fair has a really interesting but depressing look at how The President of the United States spends a typical day navigating the upfuckedness of national American politics and its capital, Washington DC — which Rahm Emanuel calls Fucknutsville.
We think of the presidency as somehow eternal and unchanging, a straight-line progression from 1 to 44, from the first to the latest. And in some respects it is. Except for George Washington, all of the presidents have lived in the White House. They’ve all taken the same oath to uphold the same constitution. But the modern presidency — Barack Obama’s presidency — has become a job of such gargantuan size, speed, and complexity as to be all but unrecognizable to most of the previous chief executives. The sheer growth of the federal government, the paralysis of Congress, the systemic corruption brought on by lobbying, the trivialization of the “news” by the media, the willful disregard for facts and truth — these forces have made today’s Washington a depressing and dysfunctional place. They have shaped and at times hobbled the presidency itself.
For much of the past half-century, the problems that have brought Washington to its current state have been concealed or made tolerable by other circumstances. The discipline of the Cold War kept certain kinds of debate within bounds. America’s artificial “last one standing” postwar economy allowed the country to ignore obvious signs of political and social decay. Wars and other military interventions provided ample distraction from matters of substance at home. Like many changes that are revolutionary, none of Washington’s problems happened overnight. But slow and steady change over many decades — at a rate barely noticeable while it’s happening — produces change that is transformative. In this instance, it’s the kind of evolution that happens inevitably to rich and powerful states, from imperial Rome to Victorian England. The neural network of money, politics, bureaucracy, and values becomes so tautly interconnected that no individual part can be touched or fixed without affecting the whole organism, which reacts defensively. And thus a new president, who was elected with 53 percent of the popular vote, and who began office with 80 percent public-approval ratings and large majorities in both houses of Congress, found himself for much of his first year in office in stalemate, pronounced an incipient failure, until the narrowest possible passage of a health-care bill made him a sudden success in the fickle view of the commentariat, whose opinion curdled again when Obama was unable, with a snap of the fingers or an outburst of anger, to stanch the BP oil spill overnight. And whose opinion spun around once more when he strong-armed BP into putting $20 billion aside to settle claims, and asserted presidential authority by replacing General Stanley McChrystal with General David Petraeus. The commentariat’s opinion will keep spinning with the wind.
(via waxy)
Designing Obama, a book chronicling how the visual branding of the Obama campaign came about, is available in several formats, most notably in a completely free online version. Written by the campaign’s design director, the making of the book was funded through the first big Kickstarter campaign.
The New Yorker has a long profile of Francis Collins, the ardent Christian whom Obama picked to head up the NIH, and the NIH’s role in embryonic stem cell research.
A year later, Obama’s appointment of Collins seemed an inspired choice. The President had found not only a man who reflected his own view of the harmony between science and faith but an evangelical Christian who hoped that the government’s expansion of embryonic-stem-cell research might bring the culture war over science to a quiet end. On August 23rd, however, Judge Royce C. Lamberth, of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, halted federal spending for embryonic-stem-cell research, putting hundreds of research projects in limbo and plunging the N.I.H. back into a newly contentious national debate.
Speaking of historical figures we can only perceive dimly, cartoonist/historicaster (let’s rehabilitate this word, please) Kate Beaton of Hark! A Vagrant adds a thoughtful, searching comment to a short series of cartoons about Andrew Jackson:
Ah, Andrew Jackson. Love him or hate him (and these days my money is on the latter), you can’t deny that he was a fascinating man. He did some good things. He did a lot of bad things. And it’s not like in his time, no one thought to duke it out with him over it all. The man had so many musket balls in his body you could stick magnets to him…
He did what he thought was good and right to do and he made himself something out of nothing, but he was a hard, racist man, and he doesn’t get to be a hero anymore. In a way I am glad that he’s such a conflicting figure, because most of the time you can’t have it one way or the other. Not all of our historical leaders deserve Nobel Peace Prizes decorating their houses, not all of our heroes get recognized for the wrongs they did like Jackson does.
Cordoba is a city in southern Spain that was capital of the Umayyad caliphate of the same name during the Middle Ages. In the tenth century, it passed Baghdad the largest city in Islam and may have been the largest in the world.
Cordoba House is the name of a proposed complex on Park Place in Lower Manhattan, two blocks from the World Trade Center site, sometimes called the “ground-zero mosque.”
Newt Gingrich thinks the name is “a deliberately insulting term” that tests “the historic ignorance of American elites.” In particular, he cites transformation of a church in Cordoba into a mosque as “a symbol of Islamic conquest” over Christian Spain.
Carl Pyrdum, a graduate student who blogs at Got Medieval, wrote a long, well-footnoted post detailing the problems with Newt’s history.
Notice how carefully he’s phrased his claim to give the impression that during the medieval conquest of Spain the Muslims charged into Cordoba and declared it the capital of a new Muslim empire, and in order to add insult to injury seized control of a Christian church and built the biggest mosque they could, right there in front of the Christians they’d just conquered, a big Muslim middle finger in the heart of medieval Christendom. Essentially, they’ve done it before, they’ll do it again, right there at Ground Zero, if all good Christians don’t band together to stop them.
The problem is, in order to give that impression of immediacy, Newt elides three hundred years of Christian and Muslim history. Three hundred years. The Muslims conquered Cordoba in 712. The Christian church that was later transformed into the Great Mosque of Cordoba apparently continued hosting Christian worship for at least a generation after that. Work on the Mosque didn’t actually begin until seventy-odd years later in 784, and the mosque only became “the world’s third-largest” late in the tenth century, after a series of expansions by much later rulers, probably around 987 or so.
The Great Mosque was actually built to commemorate the defeat of the Abbasids, the Umayyad’s rivals for control of Andalusia. Joint worship emphasized the legitimacy of the Cordoban caliphate and its superiority to the rowdy Abbasids. “Far from ‘symboliz[ing] their victory’,” Pyrdum writes, “the Mosque was held up by Muslim historians a symbol of peaceful coexistence with the Christians—however messier the actual relations of Christians and Muslims were at the time.” Before the Christians, the site hosted ruins of a Roman pagan temple.
Pyrdum’s post was picked up by Crooked Timber, the Huffington Post, Andrew Sullivan, and other popular sites and worked its way up from there. On Twitter, David Weinberger wrote: “It’s why we have blogs, people.”
Imagine a newspaper or television station reporting on this story twenty years ago; if they had thought to fact-check Newt’s talking point, they would have either sent a researcher to the library or phoned an historical or Islamic studies expert for comment. Then it may have been cut for space or time. That’s not how things work any more. Knowledge floats.
Update:Michael Berube notes that the name “Cordoba” in Cordoba House is a known reference to the deliberately insulting interior of a 1975 Chrysler.
Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight is licensing its content to the NY Times for the next three years.
In the near future, the blog will “re-launch” under a NYTimes.com domain. It will retain its own identity (akin to other Times blogs like DealBook), but will be organized under the News:Politics section. Once this occurs, content will no longer be posted at FiveThirtyEight.com on an ongoing basis, and the blog will re-direct to the new URL. In addition, I will be contributing content to the print edition of the New York Times, and to the Sunday Magazine.
The Times’ own Media Decoder blog notes that the deal is similar in structure to the arrangement Freakonomics enjoys at the newspaper: more of a rental than a purchase. I believe Andrew Sullivan has had similar deals at the various publications at which he’s blogged. (thx, nevan)
This was written by an anonymous someone at Something Awful and was reproduced a few months ago on Reddit. Here’s the whole wonderful thing:
This morning I was awoken by my alarm clock powered by electricity generated by the public power monopoly regulated by the US department of energy. I then took a shower in the clean water provided by the municipal water utility. After that, I turned on the TV to one of the FCC regulated channels to see what the national weather service of the national oceanographic and atmospheric administration determined the weather was going to be like using satellites designed, built, and launched by the national aeronautics and space administration. I watched this while eating my breakfast of US department of agriculture inspected food and taking the drugs which have been determined as safe by the food and drug administration.
At the appropriate time as regulated by the US congress and kept accurate by the national institute of standards and technology and the US naval observatory, I get into my national highway traffic safety administration approved automobile and set out to work on the roads build by the local, state, and federal departments of transportation, possibly stopping to purchase additional fuel of a quality level determined by the environmental protection agency, using legal tender issed by the federal reserve bank. On the way out the door I deposit any mail I have to be sent out via the US postal service and drop the kids off at the public school.
After spending another day not being maimed or killed at work thanks to the workplace regulations imposed by the department of labor and the occupational safety and health administration, enjoying another two meals which again do not kill me because of the USDA, I drive my NHTSA car back home on the DOT roads, to my house which has not burned down in my absence because of the state and local building codes and fire marshal’s inspection, and which has not been plundered of all its valuables thanks to the local police department.
I then log on to the internet which was developed by the defense advanced research projects administration and post on freerepublic.com and fox news forums about how SOCIALISM in medicine is BAD because the government can’t do anything right.
And to be fair and balanced (if you will), here’s the American liberal shitheel version:
This morning I was awoken by my alarm clock, powered by energy generated solely by Southern California Edison and manufactured by the Sony Corporation.
I then took a shower in my house constructed by Centex Homes, sold to me by a Century 21 real estate agent, and mortgaged by Citibank.
After that, I turned on my Panasonic television which I purchased with a Washington Mutual credit card to a local NBC Corporation affiliate to see what their team of hired meteorologists forecasted the weather to be using their weather radar system.
While watching this, I ate my breakfast of eggs and bacon, both produced by a local farm and sold to me by my local grocery store, and took my prescribed medication manufactured by Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, Astra-Zeneca, and Novartis.
When my Motorola-manufactured Cable Set Top Box showed the appropriate time, I got into my Toyota-manufactured Prius vehicle and set out to my graphic design workplace and stopped to purchase some gasoline refined by the Royal Dutch Shell company, using my debit card issued to me by Bank of the West. On the way to my workplace, I dropped off a package at the local UPS store for delivery, and dropped my children off at a local private school.
Then, after spending another day not being maimed or killed at work thanks to the company-mandated standards enforced at my workplace, I drive back to my house which had not burned down in my absence because of the high manufacturing quality of the products inside and of the company which built my house, and which has not been plundered of all its valuables thanks to the alarm services provided by Brinks Home Security. I was able to rest easy knowing that even had this happened, I would have an Allstate insurance policy which would cover any damage to my home and anything that was stolen.
I then logged onto the internet, financed and ran in part by various different private corporations such as Google, Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon, and posted on the Huffington Post and Daily Kos about how capitalism is the source of all evil in this country.
I think we can all agree that the word “shitheel” is hilarious. (via randomfoo)
The New Yorker has a nice profile of Paul Krugman in this week’s magazine. His political awakening has a somewhat born-again Christian vibe to it.
In his columns, Krugman is belligerently, obsessively political, but this aspect of his personality is actually a recent development. His parents were New Deal liberals, but they weren’t especially interested in politics. In his academic work, Krugman focussed mostly on subjects with little political salience. During the eighties, he thought that supply-side economics was stupid, but he didn’t think that much about it. Unlike Wells, who was so upset when Reagan was elected that she moved to England, Krugman found Reagan comical rather than evil. “I had very little sense of what was at stake in the tax issues,” he says. “I was into career-building at that point and not that concerned.” He worked for Reagan on the staff of the Council of Economic Advisers for a year, but even that didn’t get him thinking about politics. “I feel now like I was sleepwalking through the twenty years before 2000,” he says. “I knew that there was a right-left division, I had a pretty good sense that people like Dick Armey were not good to have rational discussion with, but I didn’t really have a sense of how deep the divide went.”
Tom Junod says that the key to understanding how Obama governs is to look at how you’d imagine he might raise Sasha and Malia. Specifically, Junod compares the President’s community organization roots with the parenting technique of positive discipline.
You don’t have to win, we were told at the positive-discipline workshop. Your child is not damaged, morally, if your child wins, if the battle is withdrawn, or, better yet, never joined. Our culture has viewed parenthood in terms of decisive moments, but it’s better to view it in terms of development, as a continual process, and to be in it for the long haul. Nothing lies like the moment of truth, and if there’s no powerlessness, then there are fewer power struggles. If your child has a problem with authority, it’s likely that you have a problem with authority, or your lack of it. The answer is to return it to your child in the form of choices, while you set an example. Your example is your authority. Positive discipline does not mean no discipline; it means that discipline is a matter of teaching mutual respect, rather than making your child suffer. “Children do better when they feel better, not worse,” is what it says on my kitchen cabinet, and so when faced with intransigence, parents have to respond by stating their expectations, repeating the rules, and then giving their children the love and support they need to follow them. Always try to include, rather than isolate; avoid labels; don’t negotiate, but don’t escalate, either. If your children are not doing well, either take them out of the situation or remove yourself. You — and they — can always try again.
It is a philosophy that could have been minted by Cass Sunstein, the White House advisor who is developing ways to “nudge” citizens to make the right choices without them being aware of the manipulation. It could serve as a precis for how Obama has dealt with Joe Wilson, not to mention Skip Gates and Sergeant Jim Crowley, not to mention Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was never threatened but rather told to “think carefully” while answering the protests of the Iranian presidential election with the truncheon and the gallows. One could almost hear Obama saying, “Use your words, Mahmoud. Use your words.”
The piece is interesting throughout, but I particularly liked this observation:
Barack Obama, then, is not the agent of change; he’s the fulfillment of a change that is already occurring culture-wide, in every place but politics. That’s why the Republicans fear him so much; why, while waiting for him to fail, they just come off as the political party for people who want to hit their kids.
In addition to being a painter of some repute, Peter Paul Rubens was also a diplomat:
In Master of Shadows, Mark Lamster tells the story of Rubens’s life and brilliantly re-creates the culture, religious conflicts, and political intrigues of his time. Commissions to paint military and political leaders drew Rubens from his Antwerp home to London, Madrid, Paris, and Rome. The Spanish crown, recognizing the value of his easy access to figures of power, enlisted him into diplomatic service. His uncommon intelligence, preternatural charm, and ability to navigate through ever-shifting political winds allowed him to negotiate a long-sought peace treaty between England and Spain even as Europe’s shrewdest statesmen plotted against him.
and a graphic designer.
Moretus was Rubens’s most frequent design client. To save his friend money, Rubens generally did his work for Plantin on holidays, so he would not have to charge Moretus his rather exorbitant day rate (Rubens was notorious for his high prices), and even then he agreed to be paid in books.
Tyler Cowen takes a crack at defining American conservatism.
Fiscal conservatism is part and parcel of conservatism per se. A state wrecked by debt is a state due to perish or fall into decay. This is a lesson from history. States must “save up their powder” for true crises and it is a kind of narcissistic arrogation to think that the personal failures of particular individuals — often those with weak values — meet this standard.
Cowen did the same for progressivism a few weeks ago.
Progressive policies offer more scope for individualism and some kinds of freedom. Greater security gives people a greater chance to develop themselves as individuals in important spheres of life, not just money-making and risk protection and winning relative status games.
Sage advice from Alec Baldwin about the Mark Sanford affair: Don’t Take the Bait.
Now is a wonderful opportunity to show the country what Democrats/liberals/progressives/unaligned learned from the Clinton era. Whatever personal problems that public officials deal with privately, leave them alone. This could happen to anyone, in any state, regardless of party. Why make the voters of South Carolina suffer while Sanford is skewered? If he wants to resign, so be it. If not, let him deal with it in private.
And Baldwin didn’t say this but I will: lefty political sites like HuffPo and TPM have and are devoting a lot of time and attention to these Republican sex scandals. Hey, they’re good for pageviews, right? That’s part of the problem too. Aren’t there more important political things going on in the world than this gossip?
A very interesting infographic of the ideological history of the Supreme Court from 1937 to the present. The color coding on the map is weirdly inaccurate but you can still be general trends pretty well…like how many of the justices changed greatly during their terms. William O. Douglas became slightly more moderate mid-term and then got really liberal while Rehnquist went from very conservative to more moderate as his term went on, especially after he became Chief Justice.
OT: I knew there was a Burger on the bench but was unaware of Justice Frankfurter (1938-1961).
Update: Alex Lundry designed the visualization and got in touch to explain the color coding.
The colors are chosen based upon the Min, Max, and Median of the area we are comparing. So, in the first view, the “overall” view, the darkest Red is anchored to the maximum ideology number across all justices and all terms, the darkest Blue is anchored to the minimum score, and the purest white is anchored to the actual median number (The Location of the Median Justice is NOT necessarily the actual median, as it is calculated via a Bayesian statistical estimate).
The second “compare” option, “within each seat, row” calculates separate color anchors for each row.
Similarly, the third compare option, “within each year, column” calculates separate color anchors for each column.
The Location of Median Justice and Court Average are not included in these calculations and their color values are set to what they would be in the overall comparison.
Update: Burger, Frankfurter, Salmon. (via @kurtw)
On the Freakonomics blog, Dmitri Leybman tells us about the three main ways that the President’s political party can have an impact on the economy.
This tendency of Republican presidents to preside over growth that occurs so close to re-election has been cited by Bartels as the main reason why Republican presidents have been so successful in achieving two-term presidencies in the post-World War II era. Voters, Bartels believes, are economic myopists, paying attention only to the most recent economic outcomes and not the overall outcomes experienced under a president’s rule.
A short but revealing interview with Eliot Spitzer over a hot dog lunch in Central Park.
I asked him why so many politicians are caught in insane sex scandals. “What is it with you all?”
“I’m not going to make excuses,” he replied evenly. “Let me ask you a question: Is there a difference between politicians and anybody else? Or is it that the lives of politicians are so very public?”
“There is a difference, Mr. Spitzer. You were elected to a position of public trust.”
“That’s right,” he conceded. “It’s why I resigned without delay. Some said I could try to ride it out. But I didn’t see it that way. What I did was heinous and wrong.”
(via the browser)
Both houses of Congress have recently passed credit card legislation which will cut down on credit card companies abusing their customers. The NY Times has a guide to what the new legislation could mean for consumers. The bill that passed the House contains some interesting provisions on how card companies can use type.
The House throws in what ought to be called “The Fine Print Rule.” Card companies must print their account applications and disclosures in 12-point type or greater. A supervisory board will also probably declare certain hard-on-the-eyes fonts off limits. The Senate is silent on typeface but imposes many other communication requirements.
From the bill itself:
SEC. 14. Readability requirement.
Section 122 of the Truth in Lending Act (U.S.C. 1632) is amended by adding at the end the following new subsection:
“(d) Minimum type-size and font requirement for credit card applications and disclosures. -All written information, provisions, and terms in or on any application, solicitation, contract, or agreement for any credit card account under an open end consumer credit plan, and all written information included in or on any disclosure required under this chapter with respect to any such account, shall appear-
“(1) in not less than 12-point type; and
“(2) in any font other than a font which the Board has designated, in regulations under this section, as a font that inhibits readability.”.
I haven’t seen a credit card application or bill in years (we’re paperless)…what unreadable fonts are these companies using? Do they set their terms and conditions sections in 6-pt Zapf Dingbats a la David Carson?
According to an article published in The International Journal of Press/Politics, both liberals and conservatives find The Colbert Report funny, but the two groups differ in their perception of Stephen Colbert’s actual ideological allegiances.
Additionally, there was no significant difference between the groups in thinking Colbert was funny, but conservatives were more likely to report that Colbert only pretends to be joking and genuinely meant what he said while liberals were more likely to report that Colbert used satire and was not serious when offering political statements. Conservatism also significantly predicted perceptions that Colbert disliked liberalism.
(via cyn-c)
Early in Obama’s presidency, one of the more encouraging signs that things were heading in a positive direction was that his daily briefing included ten letters that average Americans had sent to the White House. The NY Times has a special feature on these letters and how they reach Obama’s desk. The President’s director of correspondance chooses the letters carefully.
I send him letters that are uncomfortable messages.
But I wonder about the gatekeeper effect…Obama is really only reading what this guy wants him to read. To go further, I think Obama should wade through the pile himself once a month for an hour or so, if only to evaluate the caliber of the letters that he does see.
Update: The White House has posted a short documentary about these letters.
Nate Silver says that “voter initiatives to ban gay marriage are becoming harder and harder to pass every year” and uses a regression model to produce a listing of when the voters of each US state would vote against a marriage ban if given the chance. Some notables:
New York - 2009
Iowa - 2013
Utah - 2013
Kansas - 2015
Texas - 2018
Mississippi - 2024
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