Overnight Open Thread (11-4-2014) – Election Night Edition

Well since the site is going up and down and barely functional and it's a Tuesday - an election day Tuesday -  I'm just gonna shove this ONT out the door and declare it legally emancipated.

Quote of the Day I: Obama Knows Best Edition

"Sometimes, someone, usually mom, leaves the workplace to stay home with the kids, which then leaves her earning a lower wage for the rest of her life as a result. And that's not a choice we want Americans to make."

-- Barack Obama in a speech last Friday

Quote of the Day II: The Queen is Generous Tonight

Martin: So can we, if we go out to the polls, can we say, we have 'souls to the polls' on Sunday, can we do 'soul food after we vote'?

Obama: Absolutely, I give everyone full permission to eat some fried chicken after they vote only after-if you haven't voted.

-- Michelle Obama talking with Roland Martin on Monday

How Ideologically Coherent Are the American People?

Not very. Which can be a double-edged sword.

Despite occasional statements to the contrary, most political scientists have long known - going back at least to Philip Converse's work in the 1960s, and probably farther to Walter Lippmann's in the 1910s/1920s - that many Americans do not in fact show substantial ideological consistency across policy views, except among limited groups.The 20% of the adult population who are white voters with bachelor's degrees show some degree of coherence when it comes to views on same-sex marriage and income redistribution.  But, when it comes to the 40% of the adult public who have one or none of these characteristics - including, for example, African Americans and Latinos without bachelor's degrees and nonvoting whites without bachelor's degrees - there is no tendency whatsoever for people who lean in a given direction on one of these issues to lean in the same direction on the other.  For the remaining 40% of the adult public, who have two but not three of these features (e.g., white voters without bachelor's degrees), ideological coherence is barely measurable.

Reactions To Disgusting Images Predict a Persons Political Ideology

A new study shows that the way your brain responds to photos of of maggots, mutilated carcasses, and gunk in the kitchen sink gives a pretty good indication of whether you're liberal or conservative. "Remarkably, we found that the brain's response to a single disgusting image was enough to predict an individual's political ideology," Read Montague, a Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute psychology professor who led the study, said in a written statement. 83 men and women viewed a series of images while having their brains scanned in a functional MRI (fMRI) machine. The images included the disgusting photos described above, along with photos of babies and pleasant landscapes. Afterward, the participants were asked to rate how grossed out they were by each photo. They also completed a survey about their political beliefs, which included questions about their attitudes toward school prayer, gun control, immigration, and gay marriage. There was no significant difference in how liberals and conservatives rated the photos. But the researchers noted differences between the two groups in the activity of brain regions associated with disgust recognition, emotion regulation, attention and even memory. The differences were so pronounced that the researchers could analyze a scan and predict the person's political leaning with 95 percent accuracy.

The Top 10 Liberal Superstitions

And you've probably heard every single one of these if you've ever debated a liberal.

Justice Department Dumps 64K Pages of Fast and Furious Docs on Election Eve

The Justice Department has turned over more than 64,000 pages of documents congressional lawmakers were seeking as part of their investigation into the botched gun-running operation known as Fast and Furious.

The material was handed over to the House Oversight and Government Reform panel late Monday in what aides describe as an election eve "dump."

In total, 64,280 pages arrived on Capitol Hill - all material that had been withheld from Congress by President Obama, who used executive privilege to keep the information from lawmakers.

My Grandmother The Murderer

What do you do when you realize that your grandma is a little old lady who poisons people?

People were always dying around Grandma-her children, her husbands, her boyfriend-so her lifelong state of grief was understandable. To see her sunken in her high and soft bed, enshrouded in the darkness of the attic, and surrounded by the skin-and-spit smell of old age, was to know that mothers don't get what they deserve. Today, when I think back on it, I don't wonder whether Grandma got what she deserved as a mother; I wonder whether she got what she deserved as a murderer.

...But here's the thing: You don't want to believe your grandmother is poisoning you. You know that she loves you -- there's no doubt of that -- and she's so marvelously grandmotherly and charming. And you know that she would never want to poison you. So despite your better judgment, you eat the food until you've passed out so many times that you can't keep doubting yourself. Eventually, we would arrive for holidays at Grandma's with groceries and takeout, and she'd seem relieved that we wouldn't let her touch our plates. By then, her eyesight was starting to go, so she wouldn't notice the layer of crystalline powder atop that fancy lox she was giving you.

So the question became: How did we explain to guests, outsiders, that they shouldn't eat grandma's food? One time, maybe on Passover, my brother brought his new girlfriend, an actress. Grandma had promised not to prepare anything, and it seemed she'd kept her word, so we didn't mention the poisoning thing to the girlfriend, but after we'd eaten lunch, Grandma came out of the kitchen with these oatmeal raisin cookies that looked terrible. They were bulbous, like the baking soda had gone haywire. My brother's girlfriend ate two of them, maybe out of politeness. We looked on, aghast. She had a rehearsal in the city, but she passed out on the couch and missed it.

JS Bach And How Lies Does Not Empower Women

Why Do Americans Hate and Fear the Disabled?

Unclear on the Concept: 'Stop the Violence' Activists Beat Colleague Into Critical Condition

Funny Or Die Now Serving Up Class Warfare AgitProp

First World Problems: Lack of Minority Emojis

Teh Tweet!

Tonight's post brought to you by the confession that's currently #2 on the NYT non-fiction best-sellers list:

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posted by Maetenloch at 09:57 PM

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