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Americans enjoy lower qualities of life on every single indicator that you can possibly think of. Life expectancy in France and Spain is 83 years, but in America it’s only 78 years — that’s half a decade of life, folks. The same is true for things like maternal mortality, stress, work and leisure, press freedom…
Mr. Hedges realizes that this technique could neatly simulate the complexity of the Iowa caucuses. He creates a deck of cards to represent Democratic and Republican candidates and all of the different kinds of factions and perspectives that might influence how voters behave in their individual caucus sites. He has one…
Ziegler said he wanted to see the entire system torpedoed and rebuilt. “I think the conservative media is the worst thing that has ever happened to the Republican Party on a national level,” he opined. “Take a look at — now this is not Rush's fault. But if you look at the presidential elections before Rush Limbaugh…
North Carolina provides a recent example of science-based policy. The science itself was a study of voting habits among the population of the state. In 2013, North Carolina passed new voting restrictions. To inform those restrictions, the legislature commissioned a study on voting habits by race, and then wrote into…
Let’s be clear: Trump is no fluke. Nor is he hijacking the Republican Party or the conservative movement, if there is such a thing. He is, rather, the party’s creation, its Frankenstein monster, brought to life by the party, fed by the party and now made strong enough to destroy its maker. Was it not the party’s wild…
“I ain’t mad atcha” or “I am not angry with you.” Which should you say? Well, we’re teachers. Our quick response: “The latter.” Grammar and usage are typical components of speech rubrics— topics students need to think about as part of building a spoken presentation. But that doesn’t mean it’s always correct to choose…
This aide and other Republicans describe a recurring chicken-and-egg question: Who came first to these hardline, no-compromise stands – conservative media or their audiences? Are media celebrities and outlets simply reflecting their audiences, or shaping the views of readers, listeners and viewers? “I think they just…
Representative Tom Cole, an Oklahoman in the House Republican leadership and a former politics professor, said, “There’s a big difference between intellectual conservatism and what exists out there now. It’s much more populist in its orientation and much wider in its reach. This is not an elite opinion, a Bill Buckley…
As for those in the widening world of conservative media, for all of their complaints about the establishment, they are only too happy to acknowledge their influence in shaping the political agenda. “I don’t think conservative media is shaping it as much as it would like to, but it’s shaping it more than Washington…
In her coming history of conservative media, Hemmer writes, “In the 1950s, conservative media outlets were neither numerous nor powerful enough to create an entirely alternate media ecosystem” for like-minded Americans.[125] Sixty years later, apparently they are. And the Republican Party is grappling with the…
Now that the presidency of George W. Bush is over, the theory that we are better off with unintellectual leaders is just embarrassing, and the reasons for the embarrassment may be quantified. Measuring the psychological traits of public figures, to be sure, has a sketchy history, but the psychologist Dean Simonton has…
So why not just say, “I may have mischaracterized things a few times” and move on? To understand why that’s impossible, you have to understand O’Reilly’s persona and the function he serves for his viewers. The central theme of The O’Reilly Factor is that the true America, represented by the elderly whites who make up…
Going negative is risky. Countless polls have shown that voters find negativity distasteful in the extreme, and if a candidate is percieved as going negative, it usually costs him, but of course GW Bush is a creature of his campaign advisors and these advisors are the best that $70 million dollars and the full faith…
The NIIAC was a well-meaning attempt to collect a diversity of opinion to make sure the emerging "NII" was useful to all Americans, and it probably did more good than I suspected at the time ... The members included the usual suspects: a librarian; a grade school teacher; a communications workers' union official; the…
Turns out that a lot of the things that have happened in the lest than two years of this administration are the biggest or first or most important in generations. On the occasion of the Wall Street Reform announcement today, Tagan Godard at CQ politics wrote "Not since FDR has a president done so much to transform…