Bush supporters are in a remarkably stable state of cognitive dissonance according to this study: “The roots of the Bush supporters’ resistance to information,” according to Steven Kull, “very likely lie in the traumatic experience of 9/11 and equally in the near pitch-perfect leadership that President Bush showed in its immediate wake. This appears to have created a powerful bond between Bush and his supporters–and an idealized image of the President that makes it difficult for his supporters to imagine that he could have made incorrect judgments before the war, that world public opinion could be critical of his policies…
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We Hates Them, We Hates Them, We Hates Them Forever! I don’t know. All I can tell you is that for those of us who have felt like we never got to have any fun because the Yankees hogged it all, it was pretty fun. No pinstripes at the World Series? I can get behind that. I can totally get behind that, too. Now, I’m a transplanted Seattelite living in the Chicago suburbs. The only baseball team I could ever get excited about is the Mariners, because for one shining season in 1995 everything clicked, even when Griffey was out…
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Apparently, everybody‘s doing it. So I am too. And no, I wouldn’t run off a cliff if everybody was doing that, too. It makes for a sucky blog entry. UPDATE: Hey, that didn’t take long, but the logo isn’t as cool as the one Joey the Accordion Guy blogged. UPDATED UPDATE: So yeah, my new tag line stays for a while. BTW, that wasn’t really “Robin Williams” that commented. David urged me to do a reverse lookup on on the source, and sure enough it led right back to his workplace. He totally cracked himself up. So now I’m Reality-Based…
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Another reason to vote for Melissa Bean and against Phil Crane: the list of sitting Congresscrittes who took dirty money: Tom DeLay PAC Contributions, By State Yep, Crane took about $10,000 – amazing. He manages to be a do-nothing at taking graft, too. Lots more Rethugs took way more, and quite a few didn’t take much or gave theirs back. So he’s bumping along in the middle.
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Bishop Gene Robinson: “I will not resign.”Well, good on you. I pray that we may all be one on this issue (oh, don’t look so shocked, it’s in the Prayer Book and everything). It’s interesting how much more conservative the African bishops are, and how naive we liberal Americans were for thinking that everyone else in the Anglican world would be okay with a concept that some of us have struggled to become okay with ourselves. In microcosm, some people still struggle at the local level, but I have hopes that the strugglers can come to terms with their feelings…
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Regarding yesterday’s plane crash in Missouri: when this kind of thing happens, the airline inhibits the internal flight information that we can look up in the reservations system. There’s just no sane way to to update flifo with “Plane crashed” and not seem really crude and heartless. Normal flifo for that flight for today shows that it’s been cancelled, but with no explanation: 2AA5966/20OCT« AA5966/20OCT CORPORATE AIRLINES STL 642P B14 IRK 734P 1FX CANCEL STL -IRK - *1001 Flifo for yesterday’s fatal crash simply comes back 2AA5966/19OCT« FLIFO DISPLAY AND UPDATES INHIBITED.
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I gave Media Matters some money, a few minutes ago. They’ve made my day. In fact, I’m so cheered up generally that I’ll actually talk about something other than politics for a minute: the proposed film of Pattern Recognition. One of these days (I’m shooting for November 3rd or 4th, you know) I’ll get back to nattering on about something other than my nascent interest in politics. I’m pretty cheered up generally by a lot of the things linked at Media Matters, a site I’ve run across before. So I added them to my Bloglines list. They’re probably a little…
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It’s been interesting tracking citations of the Ron Suskind article; that paragraph about how reporters and other people who think about the issues are part of the “reality-based community” has been making the rounds. And now Joey, soon to be known as Engaged Guy, has created a handy graphic. I can’t wait to see this mutate into buttons, shirts, web banners, and so on. So far, it’s showed up in a bunch of articles gathered at The Smirking Chimp (natch), plus lots of other commentators at major news sites, plus blogs, yadda yadda. Apparently we’re all shocked and awed that…
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People ask how we do the job we do, and there’s another answer, too: because of you. We fight, and you hope. The act of taking up that banner links everyone together, even if you never take up a weapon. Freedom doesn’t mean isolation; it means connection, and admittance to a club with a wide-open membership. We have a common desire, it’s just the execution that’s different. People ask how they can support us. It’s very simple. Vote. I don’t care who you vote for, I just care that you do. Our deaths, our injuries, our sacrifices, are all payment…
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Oh, yes, I’ve been wanting one of these for a while now. David has one, and his photos always come out with much more depth and richness than my current camera can give. In the May road trip album, all the pictures I took in Moab of rock art came out pretty “meh” because of the glare, and the fact that I couldn’t change focus (much) on my camara – it has digital zoom, which I found did not work very well on pictures I took for the England trip. David’s, meanwhile, came out much better, though a stepladder might…