The Pew Forum on Religion and Public life released a report today on America’s religious knowledge, and the findings were…pretty surprising? Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons are among the highest-scoring groups on a new survey of religious knowledge, outperforming evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants and Catholics on questions about the core teachings, history and leading figures of major world religions. On average, Americans correctly answer 16 of the 32 religious knowledge questions on the survey by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life. Atheists and agnostics average 20.9 correct answers. Jews and Mormons do...
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Moody's "double agent" ratings: How the game is rigged
RJ Eskow: Despite all the evidence, Moody’s is still treated as a credible player … and one that’s powerful enough to send a warning shot across the bow of the United States government. It threatened to downgrade the US government’s debt last March if more wasn’t done to reduce the government’s debt. That’s the kind of rigged game we’re facing: One of the biggest sources of the government’s debt is the economic collapse. That collapse was enabled in large measure by the bad ratings issuing by rating franchises like Moody’s. Now Moody’s wants to hamstring the government’s...
Continue reading...Great Moments in Campaign Advertising: Morning in America
“Prouder/Faster/Stronger” A Reagan/Bush ad from 1984 featuring the famous tag-line “It’s morning in America,” was one of the—if not the—most effective campaign advertisements in U.S. history. A simple message—things are better now than they were four years ago, so why change?—yet, thematically very interesting. “Morning” both symbolizes the disappearance of the dark age of the 1970s, as well as the very real and non-symbolic message of people going to work. IMDBish fun fact of the day: The ad was directed by John Pytka, whose brother Joe Pytka directed “Space Jam.” Text: It’s morning again in America. Today...
Continue reading...Florida and Gay Adoption Laws
Kudos to Florida’s Third District Court of Appeal, which last week overturned the state’s thirty-year-old blanket ban on gay adoption. According to NYT, Florida was the last state in the country to have such a law, and Newly Progressive Gov. Charlie Crist came out in support of the decision, saying it was \”a great day for children.” It was an especially great day for plaintiff Martin Gill and the two boys (biological brothers) who he had been trying for years to adopt. Ironically, the Florida Department of Children and Families (DCF) strongly urged Gill to take in...
Continue reading...Nevada Republican nominee for Senate Sharron Angle makes fun of autism
It’s been awhile since we checked in with Nevada Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle. In the video above, taken at a tea party rally last year, she openly mocks a Nevada law that mandates health insurance coverage for “autism” (air quotes hers). She says: “Take off the mandates for coverage in the state of Nevada and all over the United States. But here you know what I’m talking about. You’re paying for things you don’t even need. They just passed the latest one, is everything that they want to throw at us now is covered under ‘autism.’”...
Continue reading...On Teresa Lewis and the Problem of Capital Punishment
Last night, Teresa Lewis was executed in Virginia. The news stories I’ve seen all lead with the rarity of the death penalty being applied to a woman: Lewis was the first woman executed since 2005, and only the 12th in the 34 years since the death penalty was reinstated. There are questions about whether Lewis’ execution will lead the way to more women on death row being executed, but that’s not the most salient piece of the story. What matters more are the circumstances of her case and whether they merited the sentence received. There is no...
Continue reading...Who wrote the Republican's "Pledge to America?"
Well, it turns out that if you open the PDF version of the Republican’s “A Pledge to America,” their follow-up to the 1994 “Contract With America,” you learn that the author of the document was not, actually, some staffer in House Minority Leader John Boehner’s office,* but none other than Brian Wild. The Hill: Huffington Post’s Sam Stein reports that Wild, as a lobbyist at the Nickels Group, “was paid $740,000 in lobbying contracts from AIG, the former insurance company at the heart of the financial collapse; $800,000 from energy giant Andarko Petroleum; more than $1.1 million...
Continue reading...Delaware Republican nominee for Senate Christine O'Donnell not so much a fan of birth control (surprisingly)
So, we’ve learned that Christine believes in abstinence, and definitely thinks that masturbation is immoral, so, it’s of no surprise, then, I guess, that she’s also no big fan of birth control. In fact, she calls condoms “anti-human.” What? In a 2006 interview on Fox News’s “The O’Reilly Factor,” the devout Catholic contended that condom use is “anti-human.” “And what … if the population is increasing, so what?” O’Donnell said. “People aren’t bad. When did humans become a bad thing? Why is it that we have to, you know, stop people from getting pregnant?” Priceless. Wait, there’s...
Continue reading...Kentucky Republican nominee for Senate Rand Paul sees Hitler around the corner
Jason Zengerle from GQ recently had a sit-down with Senate candidate Rand Paul, who has said some crazy stuff so far in this campaign cycle, and, well, Paul didn’t disappoint: Just fifteen minutes earlier the candidate whom Paul came out to support was likening the current Speaker of the House to a former Soviet dictator, so I ask if he thinks that’s what the press might be referring to when they say the Tea Party is extreme. He leans forward and smiles. “Well, I think whether or not your analogies are over the top, whether you might...
Continue reading...Unconventional campaigns
Jonathan Bernstein wonders if Sarah Palin, with a national profile and an enthusiastic base, could run for the presidential nomination successfully without playing by the normal rules: Of course, Sarah Palin sits at this point of the campaign with total name recognition and terrific enthusiasm from a not insignificant number of GOP primary and caucus votes. Those assets may mean that she can wait until longer than usual to start following the normal rules of how one runs for president. Or, perhaps, she’ll try to capture the nomination without doing those things. Is it possible? Well, we...
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