Month: July 2008

A t-shirt from the recently concluded Texas Republican convention:

There probably aren’t that many New Yorker readers in the Texas GOP, I’m guessing. Or maybe there are now.

Frank Newport looks at polling on religion:

… older Americans are relatively more religious than younger Americans because they are old — a standard pattern, but also it appears because the young people of today are particularly less likely to be religious than was the case for the young people of yesterday.  (This suggests, of course, that as the young people of today age, they will become more religious, but most likely will never be as religious as their parents and grandparents).

No, not Romney. Chris Cillizza makes the case against McCain picking Crist.

Crist’s appeal to voters in Florida is based largely on who he is, not what he stands for. His detractors attribute his high favorability ratings to the fact that his chief governing philosophy is based on doing whatever is easy and popular. Crist defenders insist that he is a compromiser by nature, an approach to governing that rank partisans might not like but that voters respond to.

Still, Crist’s passion is clearly his populist pitch not his policy chops. At the national level, Crist would be challenged far more often than he is in Florida on his stances on issues and his own proposals on key public policy matters of the day.

And, given that McCain’s appeal to voters is far more dependent on his personality than his policies, it might make sense for the Arizona senator to choose someone who adds policy heft to the ticket.

Megan sighs:

It’s odd that an entire American accent disappeared virtually overnight: the upper class American accent that covered not only the northeastern seaboard, but California as well. Some of my friends parents had it, and a few famous people are still hanging on, like former New Jersey governor Tom Kean. But the accent of the Roosevelts, Julia Child and Katherine Hepburn pretty much up and vanished sometime in the late 1950s.

Jonah Lehrer has a fascinating post on why people buy the wrong house:

Ap Dijksterhuis, a psychologist at Radboud University in the Netherlands (and expert on unconscious thought), has done some cool studies that look at how people shop for homes, and how they often fall victim to what he calls a "weighting mistake". Consider two housing options: a three bedroom apartment that is located in the middle of a city, with a ten minute commute time, or a five bedroom McMansion in the suburbs, with a forty-five minute commute. "People will think about this trade-off for a long time," Dijksterhuis writes. "And most them will eventually choose the large house. After all, a third bathroom or extra bedroom is very important for when grandma and grandpa come over for Christmas, whereas driving two hours each day is really not that bad." What’s interesting is that the more time people spend deliberating, the more important that extra space becomes.

They’ll imagine all sorts of scenarios (a big birthday party, Thanksgiving dinner, another child) that will turn the suburban house into an absolute necessity. The lengthy commute, meanwhile, will seem less and less significant, at least when compared to the allure of an extra bathroom. But, as Dijksterhuis points out, that reasoning process is exactly backwards: "The additional bathroom is a completely superfluous asset for at least 362 or 363 days each year, whereas a long commute does become a burden after a while." For instance, a recent study found that, when a person travels more than one hour in each direction, they have to make forty per cent more money in order to be as "satisfied with life" as someone with a short commute. Another study, led by Daniel Kahneman and the economist Alan Krueger, surveyed nine hundred working women in Texas and found that commuting was, by far, the least pleasurable part of their day. And yet, despite these gloomy statistics, nearly 20 percent of American workers commute more than forty-five minutes each way.

Dave Barry visits Costa Rica:

After three or four solid minutes of guide instruction, we mounted our ATVs ("ATV" stands for "North Atlantic Treaty Organization") and took off on a three-hour tour of the countryside, much of it off-road on extremely rough trails, which are virtually indistinguishable from the Costa Rican highway system. It was a great opportunity to really experience nature by driving past it at a high rate of kilometers. I enjoyed it immensely. I thought about quitting my job and hitting the road, just me and my ATV with the hotel towels strapped to the front with bungee cords. It was a nice fantasy, but it ended when I was forced to confront a harsh reality: I don’t have a job.

No.

Is the Bush administration’s decision to engage Iran without suspension of uranium enrichment another North Korea model move?

"Obama’s opposition is right along the lines of the National Education Association, and the teachers union is a reliable and powerful Democratic ally. But this is one time where he should have opposed them and made it clear that vouchers can force school districts, administrators and teachers to shape up or see their students ship out. It is unconscionable to ask a parent to watch as his child is stuck in a failing school or district, and ask him to bank on a politician coming up with more funds to improve the situation. Fine, call vouchers a short-term solution to a long-term problem, but I’d rather have a child getting the best education — now — rather than having to hope and pray down the line," – Roland Martin, CNN.