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...
Continue reading...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...New York Times Columnist Line of the Day
If you’re one of the four-or-so frequent readers of this here blog, chances are you also occasionally check out the New York Times op-ed page. You may even know the names: Thomas “Friedman’s Just Another Word For Nothing Left to Lose” Friedman, Gail “The Colander” Collins, Nicholas “The Dark Crystal” Kristof, &c. This is a daily feature dedicated to these folks: one line that is either awesome, funny, insightful, intelligent, ridiculous, or utterly divorced from reality. Today’s is from David “Yawny-Pants” Brooks, who opines for California’s heydays in his column “Tom Joad Gave Up,” writing: As jobs...
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...New York Times Columnist Line of the Day
If you’re one of the four-or-so frequent readers of this here blog, chances are you also occasionally check out the New York Times op-ed page. You may even know the names: Thomas “Friedman’s Just Another Word For Nothing Left to Lose” Friedman, Gail “The Colander” Collins, Nicholas “The Dark Crystal” Kristof, &c. This is a daily feature dedicated to these folks: one line that is either awesome, funny, insightful, intelligent, ridiculous, or utterly divorced from reality. I hope you enjoy. Today’s is from Roger “Life of the Party” Cohen, who in his Globalist column “The New American...
Continue reading...Poem of the Week
At the National Book Festival, in addition to snagging the awesome commemorative poster (which, seriously, I’m pretty excited about), I also got a copy of the Poetry Out Loud Anthology, a collection of poems high schoolers can memorize for the National Recitation Contest. Among a lot of familiar classics, here’s one I hadn’t seen before: How I Discovered Poetry by Marilyn Nelson It was like soul-kissing, the way the words filled my mouth as Mrs. Purdy read from her desk. All the other kids zoned an hour ahead to 3:15, but Mrs. Purdy and I wandered lonely...
Continue reading...The National Book Festival
This afternoon I braved the unseasonable heat (over 90 degrees in late September? Really, DC?) to check out the National Book Festival. Every year, the Festival takes over 4 blocks of the National Mall and sets up a dozen or so tents featuring authors and other literary programs. This was my first year going, and it’s the kind of thing that makes me want to live here forever, so I can go every year and take my hypothetical future children. In a day full of luminary literary stars, I only made it to a few events, but...
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 rarety 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...
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