The gender gap in campaign donations

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I thought this was interesting, not just because of the gender gap between Republicans and Democrats, but because of how few women, compared to men, donate to Ron Paul.

Women donate less money to political campaigns than men do, probably for the simple reason that they don't have as much money. (And they are far less likely to control corporations, so corporate donations are made mostly by men, too.)

But the gender gap isn't so large in the Democratic Party. Barack Obama is receiving nearly 44% of his campaign contributions from women. Clearly, there's a significant difference between his donors and those of the Republican candidates.

Oddly enough, a larger percentage of women go for Rick Perry and Rick Santorum than for Mitt Romney, which I would not have predicted. And that doesn't seem to be a consequence of having more big-money donors, either. (Since women have less money than men, on average, they would tend to give smaller amounts per donation.)

And then there's Ron Paul. Now that is a huge gender gap. But it makes sense, doesn't it? How many women are libertarians?

Men can be macho enough to fantasize about a dog-eat-dog world. They may exaggerate the importance of competition and minimize the value of cooperation. And often enough, they don't understand that a "lone wolf" is an aberrant creature, a loser, a failure in wolf society. A healthy wolf is a social animal.

Biologically, women require a secure society in order to reproduce. A man has other options. In the absence of laws and social order, a strong man can rape and seduce his way to reproductive success, spreading his seed widely and expecting that some of his young might survive.

But no woman can sow her wild oats the way a man can. Of biological necessity, women have no option but to invest a great deal in each child. And so, I think, women tend to better understand that we're social animals, that we survive and thrive in groups, not as isolated individuals, that we're all in this together.

Well, women, like men, are diverse. But it does look like libertarianism is more appealing to men, doesn't it? (Not to this man, certainly, but to men in general.) And that doesn't surprise me at all.

QOTD: Capitalist Jesus

Quote of the Day:

Michele Bachmann addressing the conservative Christian lobbying organization Family Research Council on the virtue of denying food to the hungry…

"Our nation needs to stop doing for people what they can and should do for themselves. That provides the principle of a national work ethic that we have sadly forgotten. That means an honest day's work for an honest day's pay. Self reliance means, if anyone will not work, neither should he eat."

Very inspiring! Reminds me of the Biblical story in which Jesus miraculously creates all the loaves of bread and then sells them to the hungry masses at market value and pulls in a tidy profit for him and his apostles. - Dennis DiClaudio

No time for that!

(Savage Chickens)

Admittedly, I'm usually sitting in front of my computer screen, rather than on the couch watching television, but the effect is the same...

Inequality and bullshit

(John Sherffius)

The other day, I blogged about Paul Krugman's take on America's growing inequality of wealth and income. But that's just one side of the issue. Sure, we have a Nobel Prize-winning economist on that side, but what's on the other?

From Jonathan Chait:

The conservative movement generally, and sensibly, has its cranks specialize their crankery, so that you have one set of people tasked with pumping up the fantasies of supply-side economics, another concentrating on denying climate change, another insisting income inequality isn’t increasing, and so forth. James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute is a somewhat unique figure in that he’s deeply involved in all these projects. (Here’s Pethokoukis on "the supposed crisis" of climate change; here he is touting Lafferism.)

His latest project is to deny — or quasi-deny, or muddy the waters, depending on the day — the fact of rising income inequality. ...

Here are the basic facts. For Americans at most income levels, wage growth has dramatically slowed over the past three decades, compared with the three decades that followed World War II. At the same time, overall inequality has risen, and inequality between the richest 1 percent and everybody has skyrocketed. The Congressional Budget Office’s masterful study lays out these facts in impressive detail.

The thing to keep in mind is that Pethokoukis doesn’t directly challenge any of these facts, though he wants his audience to think he does. ...

He is, in a word, bullshitting. Bullshitting is not the same thing as lying. It is a higher art form, which Harry Frankfurt once explored in his classic essay, "On Bullshit":

[The] statement is grounded neither in a belief that it is true nor, as a lie must be, in a belief that it is not true. It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth — this indifference to how things really are — that I regard as of the essence of bullshit.

Bullshitting, not lying, is the natural metier of denialists of all forms. Pethokoukis compares the debate over inequality to the debate over climate change, by which he means that liberals are using false claims of expert consensus to stifle a very open question. I agree that it’s like climate change, but in a different way — a broad consensus exists among experts, but there are different ways of measuring it, which produce different perspectives on the shape of the phenomenon.

Because the consensus bolsters the case for policy changes that conservatives don’t like, the movement expends vast resources attempting, with general success, to persuade its adherents that the whole thing is a lie cooked up by liberals. Pethokoukis is executing the dance steps perfectly. First he calls inequality a myth, then — when his primary source contradicts him — he retreats to calling it “overblown,” then returns to calling it a "myth" again. All along he pleads that he merely wants open dialogue, that it’s the liberals who are trying to stigmatize dissent and suppress open debate. The only purpose of the exercise is to muddy the debate enough to allow conservatives to avoid coming to grips with ideologically inconvenient facts.

The only purpose of the exercise is to muddy the debate enough to allow conservatives to avoid coming to grips with ideologically inconvenient facts. That says it in a nutshell, doesn't it?

As Chait notes, this is the exact same process they use with global warming and with trickle-down economics. And they use the same manner of bullshit to attack evolution and, well,... pretty much everything they don't like.

On one side are the experts armed with inconvenient evidence. When you're faith-based, you don't believe in evidence, but some people do. So how do you counter that? You can lie, but sometimes that backfires. Bullshit, on the other hand, generally works perfectly.

I mean, all you really need to do is sow doubt. That lets people pretty well believe whatever they want to believe. And when the facts aren't on your side, that's a huge, huge benefit.

Come to Jeebus, Hindus

This is pretty funny. David Williams, Republican candidate for governor in Kentucky, has been criticizing Democratic Gov. Steve Beshear for participating in a Hindu ceremony:

This past Friday, Beshear attended a groundbreaking ceremony in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, for a new factory run by FlexFilm, a company based in India that makes materials for packaging, printing, insulation and other purposes. The plant represents a $180 million investment, and is expected to create 250 jobs in Kentucky.

The groundbreaking included a Hindu ceremony, the bhoomi poojan, which was covered by a local paper. On Tuesday, Williams attacked Beshear’s participation in the ceremony as “idolatry.” and “prayers to false gods.”

Now, however, Williams has explained that he wasn't criticizing Hindus, but only inviting them to "love and know Jesus"! Heh, heh. Hilarious, isn't it?

Or it would be if Williams was a missionary and not a serious candidate for high political office in America. Given that, it's just rather sad - and more than a little scary.

Ambassadors for Christ in uniform

Here's a very important post at This Week in Christian Nationalism which shows the problem - one problem - with aggressive Christian proselytizing in our military.

An excerpt:

For the past three years, an atheist Army sergeant has had to remain silent as lie after lie was told about him by an Air Force Major named Jonathan Dowty. Major Dowty, a.k.a. JD the Christian Fighter Pilot, is a Christian officer who belongs to the Officers’ Christian Fellowship (OCF), an organization that thinks the real duty of a military officer is to raise up “a spiritually transformed military, with ambassadors for Christ in uniform, empowered by the Holy Spirit.”

As a devout Christian officer, Major Dowty has made it a practice to publicly attack and defame atheist and other non-Christian enlisted service members by name, knowing that they can’t respond to defend themselves because he’s an active duty officer, so it would be insubordinate for them to respond to him. ...

Well, one of the soldiers Major Dowty has been lying about on his blog, SGT Dustin Chalker, just got out of the Army, and is now free to fight back against this Christian bully who has dogged him for the last three years.

Dustin’s “first order of business” upon becoming a civilian was to go straight to Major Dowty’s blog and post a little comment on a post that Dowty wrote about him just this week. Dustin’s comment, submitted last night, has not yet shown up on Major Dowty’s blog, where the comments are, of course, “moderated,” so I thought I would post it here.

You should be ashamed of yourself, JD. For years you’ve made a hobby of publicly attacking subordinate lower enlisted and NCO’s who can’t defend themselves against your constant defamation. The last time I engaged you on this website, I found out that you are still an active duty field grade officer and had to end the conversation. You, clearly, have no such reservations about good order and discipline, and seem to enjoy dragging your subordinates’ names through the mud. What do you think is the effect when the leaders, peers, and subordinates of your targets come across the unprofessional and inappropriate public attacks you launch against your subordinates? How does it make you feel smearing subordinates who can’t say a word back to you? You get to blast out all of the defamation you want from behind the cover of that little oak leaf. ...

Jonathan Dowty wants the government to force his religion on other people. Being present IS participation. Being forced to stand in silent respect IS participation. The closest thing I have to a “religious practice” is to LEAVE when people do things I find intellectually absurd and irrational. Why can’t I “practice my religion” and leave? Forcing me to stand there is forcing my participation, especially when the soldiers assembled are very often the subject of the prayer. If you’re praying about me, and forcing me to stand there, that is forcing my participation, Dowty. If a Wiccan forces you to stand silently on a parade field in a position of respect so he can cast a spell on you, would you mind? Would you comply? Or would you say, “hey, I don’t want to participate in this hogwash”? ...

Preference is shown when one group is given the podium and a captive audience, gagged and forced to listen to the other group’s rituals or opinion. Preference to religion is shown when troops are forced to stand there for your prayers. Preference to non-religious people would be shown if you were forced to stand there and listen silently while a philosopher explains that there is no reason to believe in god and you’d be better off sleeping in on Sunday. This isn’t a simple dichotomy of religion vs. non-religion. Jonathan Dowty is a demagogue and propagandist who uses these deliberate fallacies to construct a narrative painting neutrality as being anti-religious, when in fact neutrality is ::gasp:: neutral.

There's much more, but that will give you the general idea. We're supposed to have a nation with a strict separation between church and state. Your religious beliefs, if any, are your own business and not the government's.

Christians, as the majority in this country, have been fighting against this basic freedom of religion for more than 200 years. Oh, not all of them. Indeed, only a small minority. But they've got the rest of America buffaloed (witness the recent debate in the House of Representatives to "reaffirm" In God We Trust).

From what I hear, the military is particularly bad, with organized Christian officers determined to make this an explicitly "Christian" military fighting a holy war against the Muslims (exactly how our terrorist enemies want to present it, too). Atheists and agnostics in the military - and members of minority religions, too - face deliberate discrimination.

And in the military, subordinates can't criticize their superiors. Officers are free to say and do anything they want to subordinate officers and enlisted personnel, unless their superiors object. But since their superiors are generally Christian, too, the fanatics often have a pretty free rein to push Christianity.

Only publicity helps. Public outcry is not something any superior officer wants, and they will rein in these fundamentalists if they start seeing public criticism.

Of course, this depends on America's civilian leadership, too. If next year we elect as president a right-wing loon who wants to make this an explicitly Christian nation, all bets are off. (Note that such a president will also choose federal judges - and Supreme Court justices - who agree with him, so even lawsuits might be a useless defense.)

In the end, it boils down to ordinary American citizens being smart enough and concerned enough to vote against this vision of an American theocracy. Unfortunately, American theocrats have made common cause with American oligarchs, both in firm control of the Republican Party.

Of course, both think that they have good reason for what they're doing. And the end justifies the means, right? Unfortunately, the worst harm in our world is almost always done by people who think they're doing good. Even Hitler and Stalin thought they were doing the right thing, and slave-owners in America's South felt fully justified in what they were doing, too.

We have to be smart enough to see why this is wrong, and then we have to do something about it. Ignorance or apathy, either one, will destroy us.

American oligarchy

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman has been making some good points about America's growing inequality of wealth and income. Here, for example, is his latest column in The New York Times.

An excerpt:

Whenever growing income disparities threaten to come into focus, a reliable set of defenders tries to bring back the blur. Think tanks put out reports claiming that inequality isn’t really rising, or that it doesn’t matter. Pundits try to put a more benign face on the phenomenon, claiming that it’s not really the wealthy few versus the rest, it’s the educated versus the less educated.

So what you need to know is that all of these claims are basically attempts to obscure the stark reality: We have a society in which money is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few people, and in which that concentration of income and wealth threatens to make us a democracy in name only.

The budget office laid out some of that stark reality in a recent report, which documented a sharp decline in the share of total income going to lower- and middle-income Americans. We still like to think of ourselves as a middle-class country. But with the bottom 80 percent of households now receiving less than half of total income, that’s a vision increasingly at odds with reality.

In response, the usual suspects have rolled out some familiar arguments: the data are flawed (they aren’t); the rich are an ever-changing group (not so); and so on. The most popular argument right now seems, however, to be the claim that we may not be a middle-class society, but we’re still an upper-middle-class society, in which a broad class of highly educated workers, who have the skills to compete in the modern world, is doing very well.

It’s a nice story, and a lot less disturbing than the picture of a nation in which a much smaller group of rich people is becoming increasingly dominant. But it’s not true.

Workers with college degrees have indeed, on average, done better than workers without, and the gap has generally widened over time. But highly educated Americans have by no means been immune to income stagnation and growing economic insecurity. Wage gains for most college-educated workers have been unimpressive (and nonexistent since 2000), while even the well-educated can no longer count on getting jobs with good benefits. In particular, these days workers with a college degree but no further degrees are less likely to get workplace health coverage than workers with only a high school degree were in 1979. [my emphasis]

So who is getting the big gains? A very small, wealthy minority.

The budget office report tells us that essentially all of the upward redistribution of income away from the bottom 80 percent has gone to the highest-income 1 percent of Americans. That is, the protesters who portray themselves as representing the interests of the 99 percent have it basically right, and the pundits solemnly assuring them that it’s really about education, not the gains of a small elite, have it completely wrong.

If anything, the protesters are setting the cutoff too low. The recent budget office report doesn’t look inside the top 1 percent, but an earlier report, which only went up to 2005, found that almost two-thirds of the rising share of the top percentile in income actually went to the top 0.1 percent — the richest thousandth of Americans, who saw their real incomes rise more than 400 percent over the period from 1979 to 2005.

This isn't new. Krugman has been pointing this out for years. Here, for example, is his column from February, 2006:

What we're seeing isn't the rise of a fairly broad class of knowledge workers. Instead, we're seeing the rise of a narrow oligarchy: income and wealth are becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small, privileged elite.

I think of Mr. Bernanke's position, which one hears all the time, as the 80-20 fallacy. It's the notion that the winners in our increasingly unequal society are a fairly large group — that the 20 percent or so of American workers who have the skills to take advantage of new technology and globalization are pulling away from the 80 percent who don't have these skills.

The truth is quite different. Highly educated workers have done better than those with less education, but a college degree has hardly been a ticket to big income gains. The 2006 Economic Report of the President tells us that the real earnings of college graduates actually fell more than 5 percent between 2000 and 2004. Over the longer stretch from 1975 to 2004 the average earnings of college graduates rose, but by less than 1 percent per year.

So who are the winners from rising inequality? It's not the top 20 percent, or even the top 10 percent. The big gains have gone to a much smaller, much richer group than that.

A new research paper by Ian Dew-Becker and Robert Gordon of Northwestern University, "Where Did the Productivity Growth Go?," gives the details. Between 1972 and 2001 the wage and salary income of Americans at the 90th percentile of the income distribution rose only 34 percent, or about 1 percent per year. So being in the top 10 percent of the income distribution, like being a college graduate, wasn't a ticket to big income gains.

But income at the 99th percentile rose 87 percent; income at the 99.9th percentile rose 181 percent; and income at the 99.99th percentile rose 497 percent. No, that's not a misprint.

Just to give you a sense of who we're talking about: the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center estimates that this year the 99th percentile will correspond to an income of $402,306, and the 99.9th percentile to an income of $1,672,726. The center doesn't give a number for the 99.99th percentile, but it's probably well over $6 million a year. ...

The idea that we have a rising oligarchy is much more disturbing. It suggests that the growth of inequality may have as much to do with power relations as it does with market forces. Unfortunately, that's the real story.

Increasing inequality would be bad enough if it were the top 20% of Americans. But at least then, you could possibly hope to break into that group of winners. And if education were what this was all about, you could even look at it as meritorious.

True, education helps. But that distinction made the most difference decades ago, with the flood of blue-collar jobs leaving this country. Now, even white-collar jobs have been disappearing. Even for technical and professional services, it's cheaper to hire overseas workers.

Educated Americans are doing better than the uneducated, but that's not the real situation with the concentration of wealth here. This is oligarchy, the very wealthiest of the wealthy doing far better than everyone else and having the political power to keep it that way.

Keep in mind that the 400 richest Americans - .0001% of the population -own more than half of our nation combined. How's that for a concentration of wealth?

Thanks to right-wing Republicans on the Supreme Court, the wealthy don't even have to spend their own money to buy politicians. Corporate CEOs can spend the corporation's money, and keep it all anonymous, a secret from shareholders (whose money it is, supposedly) and customers alike.

And the corporations themselves aren't exactly bearing a heavy burden of taxes:

CTJ looked at 280 companies, all of them members of the Fortune 500, and found that “while the federal corporate tax code ostensibly requires big corporations to pay a 35 percent corporate income tax rate, on average, the 280 corporations in our study paid only about half that amount.” And those who paid even half the statutory corporate tax rate paid far more than many of their competitors.

In fact, in the last three years, 78 corporations had at least one year where they paid no federal income tax at all, while 30 corporations paid not a dime over the entire three years. Those 30 corporations paid nothing, even though they made $160 billion in profits over that period:

– Seventy-eight of the 280 companies paid zero or less in federal income taxes in at least one year from 2008 to 2010…In the years they paid no income tax, these companies earned $156 billion in pretax U.S. profits. But instead of paying $55 billion in income taxes as the 35 percent corporate tax rate seems to require, these companies generated so many excess tax breaks that they reported negative taxes (often receiving outright tax rebate checks from the U.S. Treasury), totaling $21.8 billion. These companies’ “negative tax rates” mean that they made more after taxes than before taxes in those no-tax years.

– Thirty corporations paid less than nothing in aggregate federal income taxes over the entire 2008-10 period. These companies, whose pretax U.S. profits totaled $160 billion over the three years, included: Pepco Holdings (–57.6% tax rate), General Electric (–45.3%), DuPont (–3.4%), Verizon (–2.9%), Boeing (–1.8%), Wells Fargo (–1.4%) and Honeywell (–0.7%).

Republicans complain about poor Americans paying nothing in federal income taxes (though the working poor do pay payroll taxes to support Social Security and Medicare, of course, as well as state and local taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, etc.) But how about wealthy corporations paying nothing in income taxes?

How about wealthy corporations with a negative tax rate - instead of paying taxes, actually getting paid our taxes? And who benefits? Yes, it's overwhelmingly the wealthiest of the wealthy.

These are government policies overwhelmingly benefiting the very wealthiest Americans. And these oligarchs - like the Koch brothers - are taking their windfall and using part of it to control the political system, which gets them even more money (not to mention owning the media, which helps them control the news).

We still have a democracy, and we can turn this around, if we're smart enough. But not by heading down the same right-wing path we've been on since Reagan. Reasonable people can disagree about the right path, but the Republican path is clearly the wrong one.

Flat tax

(Ed Stein)

In God we trust?

Here's Barry Lynn, an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ and the Executive Director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State:

Now that the United States has achieved full employment, solved the debt crisis and shored up Social Security for the next 100 years, we can move on to less pressing matters.

Wait a minute, we haven’t actually solved any of those things. Yet we’re moving on to less-pressing matters anyway. What’s going on?

Yesterday, the U.S. House of Representatives spent a good bit of time debating a resolution reaffirming “In God We Trust” as the official national motto. (Are you surprised that the vote was 396-9 in favor of the motto?)

That’s right - rather than deal with pressing matters like, say, the dire state of the national economy, the House would rather spend its time reminding everyone that it loves God.

The thing is, the Republicans who control the House of Representatives don't want to solve any of our nation's pressing problems - certainly not while there's a Democrat in the White House.

In fact, they're doing their best to make them worse. Remember that debt ceiling debacle this summer, when America lost its AAA credit rating for no reason but politics? That was Republicans deliberately sabotaging our economic recovery.

After all, if they get us into the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression and then the Democrats get us out of it, that's not going to help their own political ambition, is it?

The only chance they have is to keep us Americans as miserable as possible - and hope that we're not smart enough to see through it. (And if we were that smart, they really wouldn't have a chance in the first place.)

Besides, who can be against "God"?

“In God We Trust” became the national motto in 1956 at the height of the Cold War. It was a slap against those Godless commies. The fact that it was as bland and generic an endorsement of faith as one could get was actually seen as a plus. Remember, it was President Dwight D. Eisenhower who once is reported to have remarked, “Our government makes no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith - and I don’t care what it is.”

So make no mistake, I’m no fan of a motto that divides Americans along religious lines. With polls showing increasing numbers of Americans expressing skepticism about the existence of God or defining God in non-traditional ways, the motto is increasingly polarizing.

The fact is, we had a perfectly good unofficial motto for a long time. “E Pluribus Unum” (“Out of Many, One”) appears on the Great Seal of the United States, which was codified in 1782. That phrase really encapsulates what the United States is about. It celebrates that we are a diverse nation, a people drawn from many backgrounds who are united as Americans.

Changing our motto to "In God We Trust" was just one of the stupid things right-wing loons did during the McCarthy Era of the 1950s. (Adding "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance, after decades without it, was another.)

What was wrong with E Pluribus Unum? Out of many, one. What could better describe America? That had been the motto of our nation since 1782. Plus, it's inclusive, not divisive. (I sure as hell don't trust in their imaginary "God," myself!)

These Tea Party Republicans pretend that it's all about government debt, all about the economy, these days. But when they get elected, they show their true colors. These are the same old culture warriors who gave us George W. Bush. Their policies - including their economic policies - failed horribly then, but they're still pushing them.

Well, as I say, they don't want to improve our economy. In fact, as long as a Democrat is in the White House, that's the last thing they want to do. And even if they did, we'd be probably better off with them wasting time on stupid things like this, rather than trying to implement the same policies that got us into this mess in the first place.

Still, I don't have to like it.

Throwing the poor a bone

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Pets are being pampered, while the poor struggle. As Stephen Colbert says, the solution is obvious. :)

Science and religion: are they compatible?

2011 Bale Boone Symposium - Science & Religion: Are They Compatible? from UK Gaines Center on Vimeo.

There's an interesting backstory to this debate. I might never have heard of it, and I probably wouldn't have ever watched it, except that this theologian, John Haught, decided - after the debate - that he didn't want the video of it released.

Since both participants had given their permissions in advance for the videotaping (although Haught claims that this wasn't permission to post the video), it's hard to see this as anything but Haught's recognition that he lost the debate. And that's exactly what his opponent, biologist Jerry Coyne, said on his blog, Why Evolution Is True.

That ignited a firestorm:

Yesterday was quite a day.  I never expected the inundation of emails and support I received for my post about John Haught’s refusal to release the video of our debate on science and religion. That post has now garnered nearly four hundred comments.  The students at the University of Kentucky started an online “free-the-video” petition that’s accrued almost 400 signatures, there were nearly forty thousand views of my site, and l’affaire DebateGate made the front page of Slashdot and appeared on reddit christianity. Someone even amended John Haught’s Wikipedia page to describe the kerfuffle.

Readers apparently fired off emails to all and sundry: the President of the University of Kentucky, the National Endowment for the Humanities (who funds the Gaines Center, which hosted the debate), and various other officials at the University of Kentucky—and, of course, to John Haught and Robert Rabel, who was forced to deep-six his email address.  Rabel also threatened me with legal action because of the “abusive” emails he received. But I was deeply gratified that two awesome lawyers, readers of this website, offered to defend me pro bono should that transpire.  (I’m sure there will be no need for that: Rabel was just blustering and has no legal basis for action).

I also learned what the “Streisand effect” was, and for the first time fully appreciated the power of the internet to effect change, especially change that I desired.

I do regret, though, any abuse or name-calling that came down on Haught and Rabel.  I did not ask readers to write anyone—indeed, I had no idea that this would blow up as it did, nor that people would take it upon themselves to rectify the matter.  For that I am grateful, and have learned something.  But I would ask that until this blows over—and that seems imminent—you remain courteous in all your communications with officials you’re trying to persuade.  And that also goes for any comment attached to this post.

Faced with this uproar, John Haught gave up, first writing his own explanation of all this. According to Haught, the debate was "exceptionally dismaying and unproductive," with Coyne using the time "to launch a sneering and condescending ad hominem."

Well, you can read it yourself. It's several pages long. But talk about the "Streisand effect"! It certainly made me curious enough to watch the hour-long debate. And I must say that it was quite interesting, though not at all what I expected.

First, though, let me note that the Powerpoint slides for each speaker are available here at the Gaines Center for the Humanities. Unfortunately, they can't be seen in the video. (I didn't bother with them, myself.) Also, the video doesn't include the question and answer session at the end. Apparently, that will be added later (presumably at the same website).

So, what about this video? Note that it's not really a debate, just both men giving a talk on the same topic. Haught goes first, and he seemed to be confident and at ease. I don't see how he can be unhappy with his performance. It's just that... well, he was trying to defend the indefensible. What can I say? He's just wrong.

As for Jerry Coyne, I thought he did a great job. But "sneering and condescending ad hominem" attacks? I don't see that at all. Twice, Coyne admits to being "pugnacious," but I don't think I'd even agree with that, not really. (Admittedly, I tend to be pugnacious, myself.) He was simply presenting his side of the argument, clearly and persuasively. Wasn't that the whole point? And his arguments were not ad hominem, not at all.

Although Coyne's presentation was not a reply to what Haught had just said, he'd done enough reading of Haught's books to know the man's mind. But really, I don't know how Haught could have defended his thinking any better, because it's a very hard stance to defend. Frankly, I don't know how he can believe it, himself.

One thing that struck me was Haught's idea that "personal transformation" was required before a person could understand these higher spiritual truths. In other words, it's like the emperor's new clothes. If you can't see them, you're simply not advanced enough. (It couldn't be that they're just imaginary, could it?)

That's how magic is supposed to work, too, I believe. Not everyone can work magic. You have to be special. Or that's what you're told. But science is just the reverse. Everyone can do science. If you want to check the research yourself, you can. (Admittedly, it might take expensive equipment - and the knowledge of how to use it.)

Afterwards - at some point - Haught apparently criticized the audience, claiming that it was filled with "Jerry's groupies." Maybe that's true, but I certainly don't see it in that video. Both men seem to be given polite applause of equal intensity and length. There wasn't any obvious cheerleading, not at the start of the talks.

After all this buildup, the debate was not what I expected. True, I think that Jerry Coyne clearly came out ahead, but then, I would think that, wouldn't I? I completely disagreed with John Haught before I ever heard what Coyne had to say (I have, of course, heard similar arguments).

But all that Haught accomplished in trying to suppress this video was to make sure that far more people saw it. And to make himself look petty and small, besides.

Whose blacks are better?

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Conservatives just don't get racism, do they? True, they're pathetically eager to throw around allegations of racism. Well, they've been accused of racism often enough, and they're desperate to charge their opponents with the same crime.

But they just don't get it. "I have a great relationship with the blacks." "Our blacks are so much better than their blacks." And Ann Coulter's further comment that their black is "a black man much blacker than Obama - and a real American black." Heh, heh. Funny, huh?

Frankly, it reminds me of my parents, when I was a kid. When I'd accuse them of racism, they'd indignantly deny it. And then they'd say something incredibly racist! It used to drive me nuts. They just couldn't seem to recognize their racism. They just didn't get it.

Now, I don't want to be too hard on my folks. After all, they did try. And that was more than 40 years ago. But right-wingers don't really seem to have learned much since then. Republicans understand that racism isn't socially acceptable - you have to be so damned politically correct these days, don't you know? - but they struggle to understand what that even means.

Well, keep in mind that this is the political party which deliberately wooed white racists, as part of their "Southern strategy" to take the South away from the Democrats after the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Republicans thought that it was a brilliant political move. Yes, that's how clueless they are.

Now, I'm not claiming that all Republicans are racist, certainly not. (And I'm not claiming that there are no racists in the Democratic Party, either.) When it comes to race, America has made good progress in recent decades, with even the right-wing dragged along. But often enough, it still seems like they just don't get it.


Regarding those allegations of sexual harassment by Herman Cain, I have no idea if they were justified or not. Of course, they seem to have been significant enough for the National Restaurant Association to pay $35,000 - a year's pay - to settle just one of them. (I haven't heard about the other.)

And as a condition of the settlement, these women had to agree to keep silent. Cain, of course, is not contractually obligated to keep silent, so we're only hearing one side of these events. But still, I don't know what really happened, and neither do you.

But one thing is clear. These allegations were not made because Herman Cain is running for president. After all, this happened in the 1990s, long before Cain started running for political office - any political office. The fact that Cain is a black Republican clearly has nothing to do with it.

True, since he's (apparently) a front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, Cain's past is starting to get a very close look. But unless these women had a time machine, that has nothing to do with the sexual harassment allegations themselves or with the settlements made by the National Restaurant Association back then.

Cain and his backers are just trying to confuse the American public about this. As Jon Stewart says, people always start "poking around" when a presidential candidate becomes the front-runner. If that candidate has any skeletons in his closet, that's when they're most likely to become known. It's as simple as that.

Oh, well, let's not let this distract us from other matters, like the apparent fact that Cain doesn't know China has had nukes since the 1960s! Heh, heh.

QOTD: Evidence-based history

Quote of the Day:

Keith Ward sounds just like Ken Ham. It's remarkable. You see, Ken Ham has this schtick in which he basically denies all of history: you weren't there (the only valid evidence is eyewitness evidence captured through your biological senses), and because history isn't repeatable, its study isn't a real science, isn't empirically verifiable, and is subject to whims and fads and therefore lacks any substantial objective core. ...

I agree that not every thing in the universe is scientifically verifiable or repeatable, but this cavalier attitude towards history is reprehensible. Yes, there are history laboratories: there are historians who do archaeology, chemistry, biology, astronomy and all kinds of hard sciences to confirm and test historical claims. The provenance and authenticity of documents is a major historical interest.

A discrete historical event may not be repeatable, but it is amenable to confirmation and validation. The source information can be independently verified. Multiple approaches can be taken to test a claim. Did Caesar invade Gaul? It only happened once, you don't get to repeat the invasion, and no one alive was there, after all. But we can look at the archaeology of France, we can see the linguistic evidence, we've got documents from the time, and every time someone digs up a Roman cache from the first century BCE we are getting more information on the event.

I do consider it scientifically tractable. Evidence-based, empirical study and logical analysis are right there at the heart of the discipline of history.

But you know why Ward is doing this, right? It's so he can claim Jesus, as a historical figure, is totally exempt from scientific examination. - PZ Myers

The goat rodeo sessions

This was on The Colbert Report two nights ago, but I didn't get it watched until today. I don't normally post music videos here, but I thought this was neat.

Science in America: decline and fall

(New Scientist)

Here's another article in New Scientist about science in America. I hadn't seen this before I blogged about the companion article yesterday, and this one seems to contradict that first article in some ways.

In particular, this one, by Shawn Lawrence Otto, is a lot more pessimistic. While the first article made a point of how "pro-science" America still is - an observation I struggled to accept - this is, well, the "decline and fall" of science in America.

Some excerpts:

"The big thing we are working on now is the global warming hoax. It's all voodoo, nonsense, hokum, a hoax." So said Michele Bachmann, a candidate for the Republican nomination for president, in 2008. Bachmann also thinks that the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine can cause mental retardation and that science classes should include creationism. "What I support is putting all science on the table and then letting students decide. I don't think it's a good idea for government to come down on one side of a scientific issue or another, when there is reasonable doubt on both sides."

Bachmann's rival, Texas governor Rick Perry, advocates biblically based abstinence-only sex education. He argues that evolution is "a theory that is out there - and it's got some gaps in it". On climate change, Perry says "the science is not settled... just because you have a group of scientists that have stood up and said here is the fact... Galileo got outvoted for a spell".

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich tells voters that embryonic stem cell research is "killing children in order to have research materials". Rising Republican star Herman Cain claims there is no scientific evidence that homosexuality is anything other than a personal choice.

Republicans diverge from anti-science politics at their peril. When leading candidate Mitt Romney said: "I believe based on what I read that the world is getting warmer... humans contribute to that", conservative radio commentator Rush Limbaugh responded with "Bye bye, nomination". Romney back-pedalled, saying, "I don't know if it's mostly caused by humans."

Former Utah governor Jon Huntsman argued that "the minute that the Republican party becomes the anti-science party, we have a huge problem". Huntsman has since been marginalised by Republican pundits.

The intellectual rot runs wide. Ninety-six of 100 newly elected Republican members of Congress either deny climate change is real or have signed pledges vowing to oppose its mitigation. This July, San Francisco's board of supervisors, all Democrats, passed an ordinance requiring cellphone shops to warn customers about radiation hazards such as brain cancer, despite no scientific evidence. Elsewhere, elected leaders harass and intimidate scientists they disagree with, inaccurately claim that scientists say carbon dioxide is a carcinogen, pass resolutions stating that Earth has been cooling and instruct teachers to teach their students that astrology controls the weather. Absurd comments are now not only politically acceptable, but passionately applauded. What could be happening?

Note that it's not just Republicans. That's important to remember. On the other hand, it's far, far worse in the Republican Party. San Francisco's board of supervisors might be Democrats, but outside of San Francisco, they have little power in the party.

But in the Republican Party, we're talking about national leaders, even presidential candidates (all but Huntsman, who polls almost nothing in the GOP). Unscientific, even anti-scientific, thinking can be found on the left and on the right, but it's only on the right that it has real power. That's important to remember, too.

This is where Thomas Jefferson's assumption about a well-informed public poses a problem. Jefferson believed that it required "no very high degree of education". In today's world, dominated as it is by science, can democracy still prosper?

Judging from Congress, the answer may be no. Less than 2 per cent of its 535 members have professional backgrounds in science. In contrast, there are 222 lawyers, whom one suspects largely avoided science classes in college. Lawyers are trained to win arguments, and as any trial lawyer will tell you, that means using facts selectively for the purposes of winning, not to establish the truth. No wonder ideology and rhetoric have come to dominate policy discussion, often bearing little relationship to factual reality. ...

Contrary to recent claims, the US was not founded as a Christian nation. The early settlers were Puritans seeking freedom from authoritarian Christianity. To be a Puritan was to study both the Bible and the book of nature in order to discern God's laws, a process called "natural philosophy", which today we call "science". In 1663, 62 per cent of the members of the Royal Society were Puritans, including Isaac Newton.

The writings of Newton, Francis Bacon, John Locke and David Hume deeply influenced Jefferson as he drafted the Declaration of Independence. Newton teased out the difference between belief and knowledge. Bacon laid out how we could build knowledge using inductive reasoning. Locke defined how knowledge is different from and superior to "but faith or opinion". Hume defined freedom as the ability to choose to do something or not.

Jefferson incorporated these ideas in America's founding document and they laid the philosophical and legal foundations of the US. If every human had the potential to build knowledge about reality and truth using science, no king or pope could claim a greater authority than an ordinary citizen. All men were created equal. This justified a secular government that respected and tolerated religion, but did not base its authority on religion - instead basing it on liberty, reason and science.

As I said yesterday, I think the fundamental problem is ignorance about the scientific method - not just ignorance in Congressmen and other politicians, though that certainly doesn't help, but ignorance in the general population.

If you understand the scientific method, and understand why it's necessary, you'll realize that for laymen, the only rational course when it comes to scientific issues is to accept the scientific consensus. Picking out a particular scientist to believe, or even choosing to believe a minority position in science, is just deciding what you want to believe first, and then finding someone to back that up.

Even when you think you're listening to "both sides," our biases keep us from being completely objective about it (or even objective at all). Of course, scientists - being human, too - have the same problem, but there are mechanisms in the scientific method which are specifically designed to overcome that. And, of course, they have access to a lot more information than you do, when it comes to their particular field of expertise.

(Note that some issues aren't scientific. But even then, we can take lessons from the scientific method. At the very least, when it comes to economics, for example, we can look for evidence. And we can listen to what economists say.)

So where are we now?

The situation was worsened in 1987 when the Federal Communications Commission set aside the fairness doctrine. Until that time, broadcasters who use the public airwaves were required to present controversial subjects, and to present them fairly. Once the doctrine was set aside, a new breed of radio and television newscaster took over. Rush Limbaugh and others earned massive ratings by voicing outraged opinions on political matters. At the same time, cable TV and the internet were coming online, providing innumerable alternative news platforms.

News shows now had to compete with entertainment, and so became more emotional and opinionated. A generation of journalists with a postmodern education decided that "objective" reporting was simply getting varying views of the story, but not taking a position on which represented reality. "It's not our role," explained White House correspondent David Gregory when asked why he didn't push George W. Bush on his lack of a rationale for going into Iraq. This problem, called "false balance" now pits, for example, climate scientists against deniers. This gives undue exposure to extreme views - a situation that has been compounded by the elimination of most science and investigative reporters from cash-strapped newsrooms.

Finally, there is the influence of vested interests. Between January 2009 and June 2010, for example, the energy industry spent half a billion dollars fighting climate change legislation. They spent an estimated $73 million more on anti-clean energy ads from January through October 2010. Much of the effort was to cast doubt on the findings of climate science or impugn scientists' reputations and motives. It worked, largely because the news media allowed it to.

Lovely, huh? And yes, I said this was more pessimistic than yesterday's article, so if you're not worried enough yet, how does this strike you?

Anti-science ideology has taken hold before, differently, but history may provide some lessons. The fundamental elements were similar when the Soviet Union elevated the ideology of Lysenkoism ahead of the warnings of geneticists, whom Trofim Lysenko called "caste priests of ivory tower bourgeois pseudoscience", not unlike Sarah Palin's characterisations of global warming as "doomsday scare tactics pushed by an environmental priesthood". Soviet agriculture was set back 40 years.

The political right in Weimar Germany called Einstein's theory of relativity a "hoax" and said he was in it for the money - much as climate deniers argue today.

During the Nuremberg trials, Hitler's Minister for Armaments, Albert Speer, recounted the use of new technology to deliver a uniform ideological message, much like today's political echo chambers: "Through technical devices like the radio and the loudspeaker, 80 million people were deprived of independent thought." In other words, "Dittoheads".

In his Great Leap Forward, Mao set forth a plan to transform China into a modern society in 15 years. Scientists who advised against his ideas were harassed or jailed. Mao's policies led to the greatest famine in human history and the deaths of over 40 million people.

The US is obviously nowhere near any of these situations, but is reaching a crisis point uniquely its own. With every step away from reason and into ideology, the country moves toward a state of tyranny in which public policy comes to be based not on knowledge, but on the most loudly voiced opinions.

____
PS. There's a final paragraph I want to point out. This doesn't have anything directly to do with the article, I suppose, but it shows how the Republican Party has changed:

The Republicans used to be the party of science. Abraham Lincoln created the National Academy of Sciences in 1863; William McKinley won two presidential elections, in 1896 and 1900, over the anti-evolution Democrat William Jennings Bryan. McKinley supported the creation of the forerunner to today's National Institute of Standards and Technology. Bryan's campaigns against evolution led to in the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, and drove more scientists toward the Republican party. In 1923, an exasperated Republican, Nobel physicist and California Institute of Technology president Robert A. Millikan, wrote that creationists were "men whose decisions have been formed, as are all decisions in the jungle, by instinct, by impulse, by inherited loves and hates, instead of by reason. Such people... are a menace to democracy and to civilization."

How did this change happen? Once again, I think this is the result of Republicans wooing white racists, in their notorious "Southern strategy," after the Democrats passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Politically, it was a huge success. The Republicans took the entire South away from the Democrats. From being solidly Democratic, the South became solidly Republican. True, this explicit racism lost them the African-American vote, which they'd had since Abraham Lincoln. And it lost them the Northeast, formerly a Republican stronghold. But the South more than made up for that.

But the South is also the Bible Belt. Wooing white racists had other implications than the obvious. These people were overwhelmingly faith-based, not evidence-based. And although mainstream Republicans tried to use these people, and to keep the real crazies on the fringe, now they're the Republican base. Now, they control the Republican Party.

So, was wooing white racists the wrong thing to do? I suppose that depends on what matters to you. If the truth matters, it was a terrible move. If doing the right thing matters, it was certainly a terrible move. But if political advantage matters the most to you, I suppose it was brilliant - at least in the short term.

You decide.

A conversation with Matt Dillahunty

This is the first of three very short YouTube video clips (the second is here; the third here) of Matt Dillahunty, interviewed at the Oklahoma Freethought Convention in July.

Dillahunty is the host of The Atheist Experience television show, which is not just the most popular public-access show in Austin, Texas, but also, because it's streamed online, has become surprisingly popular worldwide. (Here's one of their 30-second promos.)

You can also watch the full episodes of past shows, as well as video clips, at their YouTube channel. (That's where I watch them.) They vary in quality, of course, depending on the callers they get. But they can be very entertaining - and educational, too.

For a guy who didn't become a minister because he was terrified of public speaking, Matt Dillahunty does a great job of it now. He's clear, concise, and very knowledgeable. Well, he didn't intend to become an atheist. He started studying religion because he wanted to become a better Christian.

In Part Two, Dillahunty talks about happiness and consequences. In Part Three, he talks about The Atheist Experience TV show and how he got involved with it. It's great stuff.

Occupy Wall Street transforming public opinion?

Robert Reich, Secretary of Labor during the Clinton administration, writes in Salon that Occupy Wall Street has transformed public opinion in America, with - for the first time since the Great Depression - a majority of us favoring wealth redistribution.

An excerpt:

Not since the 1930s has a majority of Americans called for redistribution of income or wealth. But according to a recent New York Times/CBS News poll, an astounding 66 percent of Americans said the nation’s wealth should be more evenly distributed.

A similar majority believes the rich should pay more in taxes. According to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, even a majority of people who describe themselves as Republicans believe taxes should be increased on the rich.

I remember the days when even raising the subject of inequality made you a “class warrior.” Now, it seems, most Americans have become class warriors.

And they blame Republicans for stacking the deck in favor of the rich. On that New York Times/CBS News poll, 69 percent of respondents said Republican policies favor the rich (28 percent said the same of Obama’s policies). ...

A profound change has come over America. Guts, gumption, and hard work don’t seem to pay off as they once did – or at least as they did in our national morality play. Instead, the game seems rigged in favor of people who are already rich and powerful – as well as their children. ...

The old view was also that great wealth trickled downward – that the rich made investments in jobs and growth that benefitted all of us. So even if we doubted we’d be wealthy, we still gained from the fortunes made by a few.

But that view, too, has lost its sheen. Nothing has trickled down. The rich have become far richer over the last three decades but the rest of us haven’t. In fact, median incomes are dropping.

Wall Street moguls are doing better than ever – after having been bailed out by the rest of us. But the rest of us are doing worse. CEOs are hauling in more than 300 times the pay of average workers (up from 40 times the pay only three decades ago), as average workers lose jobs, wages, and benefits.

Instead of investing in jobs and growth, the super rich are putting their money into gold or Treasury bills, or investing it in Brazil or South Asia or anywhere else it can reap the highest return.

Meanwhile, it’s dawning on Americans that in the real economy (as opposed to the financial one) our spending is vital. And without enough jobs or wages, that spending is drying up.

Well, a lot of this is quite true. But, "I remember the days when even raising the subject of inequality made you a class warrior"? Um, like today, at least according to Fox "News" and pretty much the entire Republican Party?

And although 66% of Americans might think that "the nation's wealth should be more evenly distributed," that doesn't necessarily mean they favor income or wealth redistribution - especially not, I suspect, if you use that exact phrase.

I don't know. I'd really like to believe this, and that's exactly why I need to remain skeptical. I hope this is true, but I'm not entirely convinced that it is.

Besides, even if 69% of Americans know that Republican policies favor the rich, never discount the ability of the Democrats to blow an advantage. Remember last fall, when Congressional Democrats wouldn't even separate tax cuts for the rich from tax cuts for everyone else, in order to capitalize on just this political advantage?

Yeah, they're that inept.

Science in America: selling the truth

(Alex Williamson)

Here's an article in New Scientist about how scientists need to do a better job of selling scientific findings to the American people. An excerpt:

[John] Holdren's prescription was a classic example of the "deficit model" of science communication, which assumes that mistrust of unwelcome scientific findings stems from a lack of knowledge. Ergo, if you provide more facts, scepticism should melt away. This approach appeals to people trained to treat evidence as the ultimate arbiter of truth. The problem is that in many cases, it just doesn't work.

Perversely, just giving people more information can sometimes polarise views and cause sceptics to harden their line. "We can preach the scientific facts as long as we want," says Dietram Scheufele, a specialist in science communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "This is replicating the same failed experiment over and over again." ...

First, though, a bit of perspective. While some of the comments made recently by Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and others may seem alarming, it's important to bear in mind the relatively narrow audience they were intended to reach.

This is presidential primary season, when candidates must appeal to the most ideologically committed voters to win their party's nomination. When Perry invoked Galileo in contending that "the science is not settled" on climate change, it was a message crafted to appeal to hard-core Republican voters and big-money donors within the oil and coal industries - not to the majority of Americans who accept that our planet is getting warmer and that human activities are largely to blame.

In fact, few objective measures support the idea that fundamentally anti-science ideology has taken hold in the US. Scientists are generally held in high public esteem, scientific knowledge shapes up fairly well compared to other nations, public interest is high and investment in research remains healthy. "You can't find a society that's more pro-science," argues Dan Kahan of Yale University.

OK, so America is very "pro-science," but this article suggests letting the military or the insurance industry "carry the climate message." Al Gore was terrible, because he's a politician. (So,... what? We're supposed to object when a politician accepts science?) And, of course, no one in this supposedly "pro-science" nation is actually going to listen to scientists:

While it wasn't always so, US scientists tend to lean heavily towards the Democrats' camp - which helps explain why the idea of climatologists forming part of a liberal conspiracy to whip up alarm and keep federal research dollars flowing has become part of the climate deniers' narrative.

Sure, scientists have abandoned the Republican Party in droves. Only 6% of American scientists now consider themselves to be Republicans (not all of the others are Democrats; many are independents). But that's because the Republican Party has become completely anti-science.

For similar reasons, African Americans abandoned the GOP when the party initiated its "Southern strategy" of deliberately appealing to white racists. And much as Republicans would like to attract the Hispanic vote, their policy of whipping up hysteria about Hispanic immigrants makes that rather difficult, too.

So how can we convince the Republican Party to become more rational and more evidence based, as well as less bigoted? Yeah, good question, huh? Is this really just a problem with framing?

For many scientists, talk of "framing" and "selling" ideas to the public sounds uncomfortably like misinformation through the dark art of spin. This misses the point, argue advocates of framing. It's possible to communicate accurately about science in the context of an engaging frame, they say.

This author, Peter Aldhous, may have a point. But I guess I'm skeptical. Scientists are never going to be as good at selling and spinning information as their opponents. For one thing, the truth matters to scientists. In the Republican Party, the end justifies the means. But that's never going to fly in the scientific community.

Even if a scientist does believe that - and sometimes they do - it's quickly discovered by other scientists. After all, scientific results must be peer-reviewed and confirmed by independent research, and the surest way to make a name for yourself as a scientist is to demonstrate that some other scientist is wrong.

And what should we do when Democrats back real science, tell them to shut up? Sure, if Democrats are for something, Republicans will automatically be against it. (We saw this when the Democrats adopted the Republicans' own health care plan, at which point it instantly became "socialism" to the GOP.) But are we really going to discourage Democrats from supporting science in the faint hope that Republicans might start doing so?

Frankly, one of my problems with the Democrats is that they don't support science strongly enough. (Admittedly, this is one area where Barack Obama has done pretty well - though not, unfortunately, when it comes to global warming.)

Aldhous explains that education actually strengthens our cultural biases:

Hammering another nail into the coffin of the deficit model, Kahan's latest survey of more than 1500 US adults indicates that far from overcoming our cultural biases, education actually strengthens them. Among those with greater numeracy and scientific literacy, opinions on climate change polarised even more strongly.

Kahan's explanation is that we have a strong interest in mirroring the views of our own cultural group. The more educated we become, he argues, the better we get at making the necessary triangulation to adopt the "correct" opinions. On issues like climate change, for most people these cultural calculations trump any attempt to make an objective assessment of the evidence.

But that doesn't make any sense, does it? Why would scientists leave the Republican Party in such huge numbers if greater "scientific literacy" actually strengthens our cultural biases. After all, who would be more scientifically literate (and numerate) than scientists?

I don't know. The fact is, I don't think I want our scientists "framing" their findings. And I guess I doubt that increased scientific literacy is any part of the problem. I suspect that we're just not teaching what's really important in science - the scientific method.

To my mind, you can't be scientifically literate without understanding the scientific method. And if you understand the scientific method, you'll accept the scientific consensus on any issue. People - laymen, at any rate - who don't accept the consensus as the best answer we have so far - since the scientific consensus is always provisional - are not scientifically literate. It's as simple as that.

This reminds me of that debate about Fox "News" viewers, and the difference between being misinformed and ill-informed. (They are not necessarily ill-informed, since they know who the president and vice-president are. They're just misinformed, since they believe lies about them.)

Similarly, what does it really mean to be scientifically literate? It's not facts, especially when they don't believe them, anyway. The basis of scientific literacy is understanding the scientific method - what it is, how it works to correct bias, and why it's the best way we've ever discovered of determining the truth.

Morning Joe on Rick Perry's behavior

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I wanted to post this to show that it's not just Jon Stewart wondering about Rick Perry's behavior. Joe Scarborough was a Republican Congressman, and his show has a definite conservative slant. But even Robert Costa, from the right-wing National Review, was struggling to put a good face on this.

Drunk or stoned? You decide.

Still not sure? Well, take a look at Perry's tax plan:

(click image to embiggen)

Above about $200,000 a year in income, Perry’s plan would be hard to refuse. Once you exceeded that threshold, your effective tax rate would actually drop modestly, falling below people who make less money than you, and more still the richer you get. It would be like codifying the opposite of the Buffett Rule.

That’s true whether you assume the current Bush tax rates and other tax policies remain in effect permanently for the non-rich, or whether they expire, as scheduled by law.

In dollar terms, people with income over $1 million a year would receive, on average, a $637,418 tax cut compared to current law (which assumes the Bush tax cuts expire) and a $495,558 tax cut compared to current policy (which assumes the already-generous Bush tax cuts are extended permanently).

It’s a separate, simple, and extremely generous tax plan — if you’re part of the “one percent.” If you’re not, it won’t necessarily cause your taxes to go up, but it will starve the government of so much revenue that social services you depend on will likely take a huge hit — either that or deficits explode and the country suffers a massive fiscal crisis.

Indecision 2012 - ruh roh!

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Hmm,... I think Rick Perry is getting desperate, don't you?

As far as Herman Cain, well, I never thought his candidacy was serious or that he had much of a chance at the nomination, whatever the polling numbers might say. Cain is just as big a loon as the rest of them, but as Jonathan Chait points out, his popularity doesn't necessarily mean that Republicans want to elect him president.

Still, maybe my interpretation of his campaign ad wasn't too far off the mark, huh? Heh, heh. Well, to paraphrase Jon Stewart, Mitt Romney is definitely the luckiest politician in the world.