Woman sues over ’50 Shades’ sex gel
This really was a shitty poll
It was a push poll, and it’s so bad, even the Post knows it. The only lesson some progressives have learned from the previous cult-of-personality mistake is… they just need a different personality! Why on earth would you think this encourages Liz Warren to run against Clinton when it doesn’t mean what you insist it means?
MoveOn.org wants Elizabeth Warren to run for president — so much so that it has commissioned a poll with the very clear purpose of making Warren’s potential candidacy look as good as possible.
Mission accomplished. The just-released poll from YouGov shows Warren ahead of Clinton 31 percent to 24 percent in Iowa and 30-27 in New Hampshire.
How do you get results so far afield of any polling we’ve seen to date? You say a bunch of positive/liberal-friendly things about Warren before you ask the head-to-head question.
In fairness to MoveOn, the group discloses up-front that this is what’s known as an “informed ballot” — i.e. information is shared about candidates before the head-to-head question is asked. MoveOn emphasizes that no negative information is shared about the other candidates (including Clinton), which is a trick often used in such polling.
Are any of you surprised?
I didn’t think so. H/T Ron K.:
Around 45,000 suicides each year are attributable to unemployment, according to a survey of 63 countries published in The Lancet Psychiatry on Wednesday.
Health watchdogs should regard unemployment as a continuous suicide risk, and not just at times of economic crisis, its authors said.
University of Zurich researchers in Switzerland pored over mortality data from 63 economies between 2000 and 2011.
The period spanned prosperity and stability as well as the global financial blowup and its aftermath.
During this period, around 233,000 suicides were recorded each year, of which about 45,000 could be attributed to unemployment.
Continue reading “Are any of you surprised?”
Science explains why meth addicts look the way they do
Scott Walker is an embarrassment
I predict he becomes the next Chris Christie:
In a speech short on policy and heavy on restraint, Gov. Scott Walker addressed Great Britain’s most prominent think tank Wednesday, avoiding difficult foreign affairs questions while emphasizing the “special relationship” between the world’s largest Anglophone countries.
The Republican governor sought in his speech to bolster his scant foreign policy credentials ahead of his likely presidential run even as he largely declined to tackle the toughest questions on international affairs and a variety of other subjects. In his last response, Walker declined to answer a question and follow-up from his interviewer about whether evolution was real, saying politicians were better off steering clear of that issue.
“I’m going to punt on that one as well,” Walker said. “I’m here to talk about trade, not to pontificate about other things.”
After Walker declined to state his views on evolution, the event’s moderator, Justin Webb of BBC Radio 4, told him that he believed any British politician would answer such a question by making clear that he or she believed evolution was true. Walker’s campaign spokeswoman had no immediate comment.
Violence against children
Teacher Steve Singer over at Gadfly On The Wall:
As any experienced public school teacher knows, you have to satisfy a person’s basic needs before you have any chance at teaching them something new. Psychologist Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is always at the back of mind.
Students must have their physical needs met first – be fed, have a full night’s rest, etc. Then they have to feel safe, loved, and esteemed before they can reach their potentials.
But meeting these needs is a daily challenge. Our students come to us with a wealth of traumas and we’re given a poverty of resources to deal with them.
How many times have I given a child breakfast or bought a lunch? How many kids were given second-hand clothes or books? How many hours have I spent before or after school just listening to a tearful child pour out his heart?
Let me be clear. I don’t mind.
Not one bit.
It’s one of the reasons I became a teacher. I WANT to be there for these kids. I want to be someone they can come to when they need help. It’s important to me.
But what I do mind is doing this alone. And then being blamed for not healing all the years of accumulated hurt.
Continue reading “Violence against children”
Happy Hour: Bud Shank Quintet – White Lightnin’ …
http://youtu.be/ROQs2wJwuBg
Panhandle Slim… Art for Folk…
Jon Stewart, the Rodney King of TV pundits
Elias Isquith on Jon Stewart:
It’s the shallowness of Stewart’s politics that leads to his other notable weakness as a political pundit… his tendency to fall prey to the trap of blaming “both sides.”
Absolutely. Stewart will end his run as host of “The Daily Show” this year, but he lost Swamp Rabbit and me back in 2010, during his “Rally to Restore Sanity,” an event based on the false premise that extremists on both sides “here [Washington, D.C.] and on cable TV” were to blame for government gridlock and the sad state of political discourse in America.
It was all very lofty and self-promotional, and willfully ignorant of the fact that Republicans were blocking halfhearted efforts by Barack Obama and Democrats in Congress to pull the country out of the Great Recession. They were doing then what they’re still doing, except they now have a majority in both houses of Congress and are up against a lame-duck president. (OK, he was pretty lame to begin with.)
The point is, Stewart was and is a master of false equivalence, which our ostensibly centrist media uses to avoid the hard work of evaluating the information they gather. As Paul Krugman noted, long before Isquith:
America, it goes without saying, has a powerful, crazy right wing. There’s nothing equivalent on the left — yes, there are individual crazy leftists, but nothing like the organized, lavishly financed madness on the right.
But centrists have a very hard time acknowledging this asymmetry; they love to assert that both sides are equally wrong — and often seem to feel the need to invent extreme positions when they don’t actually exist.
That’s Stewart, always lambasting the obvious knaves on the right and straining to find their counterparts on the left. Always disingenuously echoing Rodney King’s plea that “we all get along.” In the end, the message of Stewart’s cutesy style of comedy and his fake news is hey, they’re all knaves, you’re better off just sitting on your asses watching my mildly amusing TV show than taking an active stance against the people who are wrecking your country.