Sharon Begley, a vision in black

I don't know if she's still their "science editor." She used to be.

Here's Dr. Hot Tamale opining on your mental stability:

"Rather than search rationally for information that either confirms or disconfirms a particular belief," he says, "people actually seek out information that confirms what they already believe." And God knows, in the Internet age there is no dearth of sources to confirm even the most ludicrous claims (my favorite being that the moon landings were faked). "For the most part," says Hoffman, "people completely ignore contrary information" and are able to "develop elaborate rationalizations based on faulty information."

Note that there is certainly a germ of truth in that -- but that applies to everyone. Including hardcore liberal partisans such as Dr. Va-Va Vavoom here.

But she never gets around to mentioning that phenomenon when it comes to her fellow liberals. As I'll show later, she only starts discussing the irrational bits of the mind's software when she's explaining conservative beliefs and behavior.

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For an explanation of this behavior, look no further than the psychological theory of cognitive dissonance. This theory holds that when people are presented with information that contradicts preexisting beliefs, they try to relieve the cognitive tension one way or another. They process and respond to information defensively, for instance: their belief challenged by fact, they ignore the latter. They also accept and seek out confirming information but ignore, discredit the source of, or argue against contrary information, studies have shown.

Which brings us back to health-care reform—in particular, the apoplexy at town-hall meetings and the effectiveness of the lies being spread about health-care reform proposals. First of all, let's remember that 59,934,814 voters cast their ballot for John McCain, so we can assume that tens of millions of Americans believe the wrong guy is in the White House. To justify that belief, they need to find evidence that he's leading the country astray. What better evidence of that than to seize on the misinformation about Obama's health-care reform ideas and believe that he wants to insure illegal aliens, for example, and give the Feds electronic access to doctors' bank accounts?

Obama's opponents also need to find evidence that their reading of him back in November was correct. They therefore seize on "confirmation" that he wants to, for instance, redistribute the wealth, as in his “spread the wealth around” remark to Joe the Plumber—finding such confirmation in the claims that health-care reform will do just that, redistributing health care from those who have it now to the 46 million currently uninsured. Similarly, they seize on anything that confirms the “socialist” label that got pinned on Obama during the campaign, or the pro-abortion label—anything to comfort themselves that they made the right choice last November.

There are legitimate, fact-based reasons to oppose health-care reform. But some of the loudest opposition is the result of confirmatory bias, cognitive dissonance, and other examples of mental processes that have gone off the rails.

So, there you go. Mental processes that have gone off the rails.

This is not exactly a new thesis for Newsweek's smoking-hot science editor.

Indeed, she makes these claims every several months. Prompted by a new study or new claim of evolutionary psychology or new buzzword from pop-psych, Dr. Droolworthy rushes to use the new learning to explain... why conservatives are crazy.

Sharon Begley, May 2007: Bush is mentally ill, suffering from delusions due to deep denial.

Sharon Begley, June 2007: Democrats lose elections because they target the rational side of the brain, while Republicans target the irrational side.

Sharon Begley, October 2007: Those who deny global warming are kooks and cranks like those nuts who deny the moon landing.

Clearly, Dr. Sizzle-Pants is fond of using "science" to belittle her political opponents. She diagnoses supposed maladies of conservative thinking, but never examines, for example, Trutherism, or the plainly-insane passion that many liberals have for Obama (some seeming to believe he is actually at least a minor deity sent by God Himself to save us).

Over and over again she returns to her idee fixe, that Republicans are simply irrational at best and mentally sick at worst.

She's either a hack, both political and in terms of repeating herself as hacks tend to do, or she's suffering from a mental illness herself.

Good Heavens You're Beautiful! Suggested by a commenter.

Posted by: Ace at 03:14 PM | Comments (1)
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I would say "What if Bush had done this?," but the thing is, no president should be doing this.

It is amazing to me that Barack Obama seems to have no boundaries whatsoever.

Ever think you can get away with doing something, probably, but then stop yourself from doing it because you don't like where it might lead you? That is, your super-ego checks in and argues "Can you really trust yourself entirely?" and, being not altogether confident in your own integrity and capacity to resist temptation, you refrain from taking the problematic action?

Yeah, well, Obama has no idea what I'm talking about.

He trusts himself implicitly. There's not a step or a tactic or a shortcut he shies away from taking.

Before Obama -- B.O., in Spike Lee's BO/AO dating system -- it was understood that the president was not permitted to direct whole agencies, supposedly nonpartisan, to become merely taxpayer-funded organs of his campaign committee.

Change.

I was invited by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to take part in a conference call that invited a group of rising artist and art community luminaries “to help lay a new foundation for growth, focusing on core areas of the recovery agenda - health care, energy and environment, safety and security, education, community renewal.”

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Backed by the full weight of President Barack Obama’s call to service and the institutional weight of the NEA, the conference call was billed as an opportunity for those in the art community to inspire service in four key categories, and at the top of the list were “health care” and “energy and environment.” The service was to be attached to the President’s United We Serve campaign, a nationwide federal initiative to make service a way of life for all Americans.

It sounded, how should I phrase itÂ…unusual, that the NEA would invite the art community to a meeting to discuss issues currently under vehement national debate. I decided to call in, and what I heard concerned me.

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We were encouraged to bring the same sense of enthusiasm to these “focus areas” as we had brought to Obama’s presidential campaign, and we were encouraged to create art and art initiatives that brought awareness to these issues. Throughout the conversation, we were reminded of our ability as artists and art professionals to “shape the lives” of those around us. The now famous Obama “Hope” poster, created by artist Shepard Fairey and promoted by many of those on the phone call, and will.i.am’s “Yes We Can” song and music video were presented as shining examples of our group’s clear role in the election.

Obama has a strong arts agenda, we were told, and has been very supportive of both using and supporting the arts in creative ways to talk about the issues facing the country. We were “selected for a reason,” they told us. We had played a key role in the election and now Obama was putting out the call of service to help create change. We knew “how to make a stink,” and were encouraged to do so.

P-shop thanks to Slublog

A machine that the NEA helped to create could potentially be wielded by the state to push policy. Through providing guidelines to the art community on what topics to discuss and providing them a step-by-step instruction to apply their art form to these issues, the “nation’s largest annual funder of the arts” is attempting to direct imagery, songs, films, and literature that could create the illusion of a national consensus....

And if you think that my fear regarding the arts becoming a tool of the state is still unfounded, I leave you with a few statements made by the NEA to the art community participants on the conference call. “This is just the beginning. This is the first telephone call of a brand new conversation. We are just now learning how to really bring this community together to speak with the government. What that looks like legally?…bare with us as we learn the language so that we can speak to each other safely… “

Is the hair on your arms standing up yet?

Yes, It Is.

You know, I don't drop the N-word much (Nazi, I mean), but seriously, if you don't want to be called a Nazi, stop doing Nazi stuff.

As a commenter points out, artists are overwhelmingly leftists and do 99% of Thy Master's Bidding anyway. And yet they apparently feel they must organize the effort and have the NEA -- the country's largest funder of art -- slip out the word that all efforts in this area would be much appreciated.

Thanks to JeffW.

Oh: Remember, before the NEA told them to, photographers and mainstream magazines were shooting Obama with halos and nimbuses (yes, nimbi, whatever) suggesting that he was in fact The Risen Christ.

Now, if the artistic community is already portraying you, ludicrously and blasphemously, as a deity, is it really necessary to ask them to work on your behalf?

Posted by: Ace at 01:51 PM | Comments (9)
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Denial: Spence Ackerman called, and got right on through, as he's a lefty:

“This report is false, wrong and bogus,” said CIA spokesman George Little.

Incidentally, Erick Erickson checked his spam folder and he has an email from the CIA spokesman, too, saying it's not true.

Seems to quash the rumor. Unless it's so hush-hush at this point that not even the CIA spokesman knows about it, but in that case, how did Erick Erickson get tipped?

Thanks to Gabe for that update.

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Only a rumor, only a rumor.

Still, it's big enough to link. It's from RedState.

IÂ’m hearing a very credible rumor that Leon Panetta has dispatched a resignation letter to Barack Obama on vacation.

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The rumor is unconfirmed, but given the sourcing I think it is safe to treat it credibly.

Thanks to Gabe.

Who's Left? Cautiously Pessimistic writes what I was just going to--

Any bets on who replaces him? An ACORN founder, or avowed communist, maybe?

Don't forget "union stooge."

Or...

I've got the perfect person.

Sandy Berger.

Thanks to Ben for that.

Background: In case you missed it, Drudge and everyone else linked this ABCNews story reporting a profanity-filled screaming fight between Panetta and some of Obama's toadies. and the threat -- threat -- of resignation.

Thanks to A.G. for providing the link.

Posted by: Ace at 11:20 AM | Add Comment
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Over ten years. Hey, that's just 1.44 trillion per year. Practically chump change.

Chart found at Greg Mankiw

Just so you know, the CBO's baseline projections are based -- due to the law and rules of how they do these things -- only on actual law. So, for example, the CBO does not factor the costs of partially extending the expiring Bush tax cuts -- at least to the poor and middle class, as Obama has promised -- into its figures. Nor Congress passing a one- or two- year duration adjustment to the tax code to keep the Alternate Minimum Tax from hitting millions of middle-class taxpayers, which they do every time it comes up.

Such things make the CBO's projections implausible. To make more plausible projections, you have to take into account not just the law as it is but the law as it almost certainly will be.

With todayÂ’s release of new budget projections from the Obama administration showing deficits totaling more than $9 trillion over the next 10 years, The Concord Coalition said that cost control must be the primary focus of health care reform and called for a bipartisan deficit reduction plan. Furthermore, the administrationÂ’s numbers are optimistic when compared to what would occur if we simply extended current policy. The Concord Coalition Plausible Baseline, created using the Congressional Budget OfficeÂ’s (CBO) updated projections, shows that current policy would lead to $14.4 trillion in deficits over the next 10 years.

“You would have to be in a coma for these numbers not to be an effective wake-up call. The most disturbing thing is not the astronomical deficit this year or next, but the unacceptably high deficits that persist after the economy has presumably recovered in 2011 and beyond. It’s time to come out of the partisan trenches and begin work on real solutions. Clearly, we have a serious structural problem that requires legislative action,” said Concord Coalition Executive Director Robert L. Bixby.

The PresidentÂ’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) projects this yearÂ’s budget deficit of $1.6 trillion will be followed by a deficit of $1.5 trillion in 2010 and then deficits will average $840 billion, or 4.5 percent of GDP, through 2019.

ConcordÂ’s plausible baseline uses CBOÂ’s more pessimistic economic assumptions and assumes that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts are extended with continued relief from the alternative minimum tax, that the temporary tax cuts enacted as part of the 2009 stimulus bill are also extended, that discretionary spending grows at the same rate as economic growth (GDP), and that spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan slows gradually. It shows much larger deficits averaging $1.4 trillion from 2011-2019, or 8 percent of GDP.

Concord warned that sustained budget deficits of this size would be unprecedented in the United States and would increase our reliance on foreign lenders. By 2019, debt held by the public will reach 100 percent of GDP and added debt service would push the federal governmentÂ’s interest costs to a trillion dollars per year. At 5 percent of GDP, debt service will exceed projected spending on national defense or all other discretionary spending.

Their projection does not include Obama's health care debacle, though, and other super-spending initiatives.

So add those mighty logs on to this white-hot fire of fiscal ruination.

Posted by: Ace at 10:59 AM | Comments (6)
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Dum-Dum just asked if I was running out of polls. Well no, as it turns out. Thanks for the tip, Dummy.

Yesterday or so I goofed on Gallup for boosting Obama by stating that he was still in the double-digits regarding net approval (approve minus disapprove). I wondered if they'd make hay out of that same artificial boundary now that he's fallen into single-digit net approval, or if they would instead start saying "Obama retains a net approval exceeding the 'Lucky 7' cushion."

Well, he's actually at net-seven now, as it turns out. Approve 51%, disapprove 44%.

With adults, I remind everyone.

Rasmussen's poll of likely voters has him at negative one again, 49-50.

The Obama Effect: Blanche Lincoln, a Democratic Senator in red-state Arkansas, is now trailing a couple of relative-unknowns in polls.

Not by a lot, but the rule generally is that if you're an incumbent at less than 50%, you're vulnerable, and if you're at 40%, as Lincoln is, you're in grave peril.

For some cowbell, here's Jennifer Connelly riding a toy pony in the movie Career Opportunities. No one saw it and no one remembers it, but this image, from the commercial campaign, is seared, seared into my memory.
more...

Posted by: Ace at 10:25 AM | Comments (3)
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Is this a nitpick? I don't think so. Obama is supposedly an intellect on par with DaVinci. He doesn't really do anything, but, unlike that troglodyte Sarah Palin, he actually reads. Like, whole books 'n stuff. Real books without pictures.

Or, at least, he's photographed holding them.

Looks like President Obama is one slow reader.

The commander in chief's list of beach books for his Martha's Vineyard vacation includes an environmental best seller that he bragged about reading almost a year ago on the campaign trail.

Obama was so taken with Thomas Friedman's "Hot, Flat and Crowded" that he quoted it at a rally last September in Flint, Mich., and one media outlet described it as the book that was currently on the then-candidate's nightstand.

The 448-page book appeared again on Monday on the list of five books that Obama planned to read on his vacation in Martha's Vineyard.

So apparently President Einstein is a lip-reader.

Or I guess maybe he just wants to re-read it, since it was a such a page-turning potboiler the first time around he skimmed huge sections of it just to get to the surprise ending.

About 20 years ago I remember the media snarking on a spate of intellectual-posturing celebrities all being photographed on planes with Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum. Unlikely they were actually reading it, because the book was wordy, weighty, and slow, and it took me a month of forcing myself to read it to finish it, and I was in school and had a lot of free time.

There is a whole category of books that sell well primarily because people want to be perceived as the sort of person who reads that book. Despite the fact they're not.

And there is an old observation in the media world that The Economist persists as a viable magazine precisely due to that vanity.

Bonus: "I Just Wanted to Come and Breathe the Same Air as [the Obamas]: Remember when the MSM used to poke fun at conservative Republicans for what they perceived as an over-fondness, verging on hero-worship, of George W. Bush?

I do.

The difference in the positive play for outright Obama worship? (And yes, I do mean literal worship, as if venerating a deity.)

The media gets this one. They can see it. It's not something to goof on; it's something instead to proudly report so as to demonstrate how wildly popular President Forty-Eight Percent is.

Posted by: Ace at 10:03 AM | Comments (2)
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Well, that's at least one segment of their economy they can expect to boom for a while. Apparently they "forgot" about some 25 year old law that just sunsetted and its going to take the nimble EU legislative ninjas 3 months to plug the newly opened loophole.

Retailers who sell children violent or pornographic videos will be immune from prosecution for the next three months after the discovery of a government blunder 25 years ago...

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 09:59 AM | Add Comment
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The best chance for such a thing, ever, and Kennedy blocked it.

In Kennedy's mind, all of these achievements paled next to his long-deferred dream of national health insurance. When President Nixon proposed a plan for universal coverage that would have delighted Democrats in later years, Kennedy, who long backed a government plan, led the opposition, a move he later regretted. So he moved to partial reforms, but even here he was often disappointed. His hopes of a major restructuring were dashed in the early 1990s with the defeat of Bill and Hillary Clinton's health-care initiative.

Slublog notes that health care seems not to have been Kennedy's most cherished dream. Mindless partisanship was.

So let's win one for Teddy. Let us call ourselves the Ted Kennedy Memorial Single-Payer Opposition and Capitalist Private Health-Care Supporting Movement.

Ouch: Treacher clever:

“If they’re going to talk about Camelot, then we get to talk about The Lady in the Lake.”

Thanks to Dave in Texas.

Shock: Devall "19% Approval" Patrick Would Support a Change in Kennedy's Previous Law to Allow an Appointed Successor/Regent: Kennedy, remember, changed the old law taking away then-governor Romney's ability to appoint an interim senator.

Just before he died Kennedy insisted that it be changed again, because Massachusetts needs two Senators, which it didn't need three or four years ago.

Rumor has it -- I'm out on a limb here, but I'll pass the rumor along anyway -- that Kennedy's and the Masshole Dems' change of thinking may be somehow tangentially related to the fact that Romeny is a Republican and Patrick is a Democrat.

Thanks to D-i-T again.

Posted by: Ace at 09:28 AM | Comments (1)
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Galling hypocrisy.

A month after they voted to punish some corporate executives for taking hefty bonus payouts, members of the House of Representatives quietly gave their own staffers a new potential bonus by making even their top-earning aides eligible for taxpayer dollars to repay their student loans.

Those 'top-earning' aides make around $150K/ year. One of the commenters at the story link noted that here the government is giving its employees money to pay off what are (likely) government loans in the first place.

Loans on which the interest is no longer even tax-deductible for us ordinary suckers taxpayers on the outside.

Spokesman Jeff Ventura:

"We regard this benefit as a major job recruitment and retention tool," he said. "Even in a bad job market, we compete with the private sector for the kind of talented employees government work today demands."

Emphasis me. Now, why would anyone think that Congress is out of touch?

Sincerely, guys. You don't have to give bonuses to your staff this year. They're not in danger of being recruited away anytime soon.

I dare say you could reduce their pay right now. Hell, institute a schedule of mandatory beatings. Wouldn't matter. They're not going anywhere.

If they have a better grasp of the situation out here in Reality Land than you do, you couldn't pry them out of their nice government gigs right now with a crowbar.

Morons, please do check out the comments at the story link. Some of them are pretty good. Cannot help but notice that no lefties have shown up to defend or minimize this move.

UPDATE: Spouse of former Hill staffer, in comments:

Are you f***ing kidding me??? These top Congressional staff jobs are fought over. They get HUNDREDS of resumes every time one comes open, and almost none of them are ever advertised. Work for a Congressman for 4 years - walk out into a $200,000+ lobbying job. These a**holes don't need student loan payoffs.

Great.

Posted by: LauraW at 09:26 AM | Comments (1)
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Remember, before the public knew about this, this was being sold by de facto DNC spokesmen as a good thing.

Now that they're not selling it to liberals, anymore, but are instead selling it to moderates, the intended "killing" of the private insurance industry becomes a "myth."

Paul Krugman, as an early booster of the private-plan "killing" government option, can resolve the supposed debate here. We have video of him at least twice stating that the government option is intended to, and would, kill private coverage.

As someone who was an early booster, before most people knew the intent of this plan, and as an economist, and as an editorialist for the NYT, he could resolve this debate by simply stating "Yes, as I myself have said on several occasions, this plan would kill private insurance."

But as far as I know he has not commented upon the issue since it became a controversy. He has simply avoided it, because he knows his honest assessment would hurt Obama.

So he lies through omission. Reading Krugman's columns now you'd never at all be alerted to the fact that there is a major controversy regarding this aspect of the government option, an aspect he long championed. (Well, he says in a perfect world without politics he'd take us to single payer right away, but he's willing to support the government option as a sneaky way to accomplish that goal without alerting the public exactly what's afoot.)

Will Krugman ever address this major controversy in which he appears to occupy a central and dispositive role?

Posted by: Ace at 09:07 AM | Comments (1)
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