So, just in time for the first post of the new morning, I seem to have lost the ability to properly embed tweets or images. Hopefully, it’s the usual FYWP 3am/4am daily update, and the developers will be able to fix it later today…
ETA: I pulled out the extraneous code, for now.
From LA Mag, “Adam Schiff Is Ready to Rumble”:
… He is world-famous now. The chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence can now see himself caricatured on Saturday Night Live. In Trump’s Twitterverse, he’s the limp, Ivy League-educated elitist scheming to bring down the President of the Real America. To his supporters, he is Elliot Ness chasing Al Capone, Joseph Welch facing down Joseph McCarthy. Which of these images wins out may ultimately determine nothing less than the fate of the free world.
Or, as Schiff put it while sitting in his office, his expression indicating a half-hearted attempt at gallows humor: “Just another day.”…
I visited him the day after the Republican attempt to disrupt the hearings, which Schiff spoke of with a mixture of irritation and faint amusement. “We knew they were planning some kind of a stunt,” Schiff told me. “We didn’t know what kind, but we knew something was up because they had a [press conference] podium set up with a list of [speakers’] names.”
His reaction was pure Schiff: “I excused the witness so that she would not have to be part of it,” he said. “Then I left the room. Eventually, they got bored and left.
“They were disappointed,” he added. “They wanted a confrontation.” As it happens, they got one. According to a transcript of the proceedings released afterward, Schiff reserved special bile for Matt Gaetz, the fratty Florida Republican who has been one of the president’s most vocal Congressional cheerleaders. “Mr. Gaetz, please absent yourself!” Schiff said sternly when Gaetz crashed the hearing in violation of House rules. “You’re going to have someone remove from the hearing?” Gaetz replied with surprise. “No,” Schiff shot back. “You’re going to remove yourself.”…
Equanimity comes naturally to Schiff, but it’s also a part of a conscious strategy. “I do think that this is such a head-on-fire kind of a time that there’s a premium amount of people talking rationally. Along the way I’ve had people say, ‘You need to get angrier. You need to yell.’ I say, ‘Look, there are plenty of people getting angry right now. That’s just not who I am.’ And I think people in my line of work who have a problem, it’s often because they try to be something they’re not or someone they’re not. I’ve never tried to be anything other than what I am, and so I tell those who are looking for someone more incendiary there are lots of other choices.”
The other advantage, Schiff said, is that when he does show anger people pay far closer attention. “If you’re not angry all the time,” he said, “then people do notice when you are. And it tends to have more of an impact.”…
Schiff’s work ethic—and slight dorkiness —was on full display in June during one of several days that I followed him. His day began early with a morning “hit” on NBC, an interview carried out in a small hallway just off of the Rotunda…
The rest of the day included House votes, a meeting with a delegation of Armenian interns, a radio interview on the Mueller investigation, recording several spots for the Democratic Caucus, and, finally, an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer.
As Schiff drove me to the studio, he looked almost cool in his reflective shades. (It’s a fleeting moment. He drives an Audi whose license plate frame bears a line from The Big Lebowski: “I don’t roll on Shabbos.”) Once inside the studio, just before he was miked up, Schiff tapped a small toy wolf on a shelf. “It’s a tradition,” he said, “for good luck.” At Blitzer’s desk—a small, red, glass-topped island in a sea of Pacific-blue tile—Schiff waited patiently as Blitzer recounted the day’s news, including Trump’s callous reaction to a photo of two immigrants, a father and daughter, found dead on a riverbank near the Mexico-U.S. border. “Does it ever stop?” Blitzer asked. The congressman responded with a withering takedown of Trump that left the room silent for a moment.
On the way back to his car, Schiff still seemed incensed, showing the rare flash of anger he had spoken about earlier. But there was no time to dwell—fresh outrages were piling up almost hourly. As fate would have it, he was one of the few people in America who could do something about it.
NotMax
Yeah, seeing the raw code.
Repeating, as it sort of got buried in the initial new thread frenzy.
rikyrah
Good Morning, Everyone😊😊😊
Armadillo
Seeing raw code using Chrome on both a Samsung Android device and a Windows laptop.
In all sincerity, the new site looks great. Many thanks to Watergirl and everyone who put in so much hard work.
rikyrah
Chairman Schiff wasn’t playing with the GOP clowns😒😒
rikyrah
NYT picture of yesterday ‘s testifying heroes
twitter.com/TomJolly/status/1194798155314933760
sukabi
Seeing code for the imbeds on Android in an ad blocker browser. And also on Chrome on Android.
Edit comment function seems to work.
JimV
The LA Mag long block quote worked, but none of the other inserts did (on my Chrome browser)–sorry.
On a different blog yesterday I read a long comment by a Trump supporter who sees the situation 180 degrees differently from me: Trump is a Hero, the Democrats have lost all sense of decency, the Mueller Report and the impeachment hearings are shameful shams full of lies and propaganda, etc. Very depressing because it was a science blog and the same commenter made a reasonable comment on the science topic of the post previous to his response to the poster’s (and several commenter’s including me) opinion of Trump. I mean, he didn’t seem like an idiot, but his political comment was from Bizzaro World. We need to fix this, but how?
Maybe a montage of Trump’s on-camera outrages over the years? The Billy Bush conversation, “Russia, if you’re listening …”, “I fired Comey because he wouldn’t stop the investigation”, and a whole lot more. I would donate up to half my yearly income to something like that, if it could reach one person (preferably the aforesaid commenter).
NotMax
As for the site redesign, maybe a dozen things which rankle.
Some are purely cosmetic choices – as it is not my blog I shan’t dwell on them, as I wouldn’t someone’s unusual interior decoration choices when visiting their domicile.
Some set the ol’ pedant spidey sense into overdrive, others appear to be because-we-can frippery, distracting focus from the natural path of eye movement across a page while adding nothing of value.
The biggie is the continuing opinion that the metadata (topics, share widgets) work better at the tail end of a post, as on the old site. Showing up between the byline and the opening sentence of a post is an interruption of communication and a visual speed bump. Plus, how could anyone be expected to decide whether or not he/she cares to share a post before reading it? It makes no sense to place the widgets where they now are.
/mini-critique
David 🎃🧙Booooooo🧙🎃 Koch
Bloomberg is going to announce on Monday his presidential bid.
Raven
It’s all fine with me.
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning .
Baud
@David 🎃🧙Booooooo🧙🎃 Koch: Deval Patrick announced yesterday .
Baud
Can’t be fixed. Can only be defeated.
AJ
Site looks excellent to me.
Chrome on OS X.
Great job Watergirl.
JPL
The testimony yesterday was compelling and I hope that it made some republicans nervous
Where’s Blech this morning?
NotMax
Aside for those with a Roku, particularly those partial to the kind of stuff shown on TCM –
A relatively new free streaming channel there is Film Rabbits. Curious, small collection of content, including titles difficult to find anywhere else. Limited interruption by ads, and of course also some of the usual more dreck-y public domain fare.
Probably mentioned here previously is the free with limited ads streaming channel Classic Movie Vault. If one wades through the dross there’s a decent amount of solid and rarely shown B films to be discovered, including a plethora from Britain.
HinTN
It took following the link to Cole’s Twitter feed and then linking back to get here. The old bookmark, which looks the same as the new bookmark, kept getting the birthing notice. Maybe cache… Anyhoo, works for me.
And, …, edit appears to work.
Android running Chrome
HinTN
@JPL:
Maybe he’s cached, too.
Using the quote function takes getting used to.
biff murphy
Site looks great, congrats!
JPL
Maybe we are on the alternate site and only the special few are allowed on the real balloon juice.
danielx
Mental jury still out on the new….thing. But have to appreciate all the hard work.
Ladyraxterinok
@HinTN:
Baud
@JPL: No. I’m here.
satby
I can see some little glitches from yesterday are now fixed. The share widgets at the top near the title of the post are fairly standard on most other sites, so not really a big deal to me. I think it’s great, and I hope WaterGirl gets the credit due her. This was such a labor of love done by her for her community.
satby
@rikyrah: Good morning 🙋
danielx
Watching proceedings yesterday reminded me of that old bit of advice for lawyers: if you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you don’t have either, pound the table.
Republicans are most def on clause three….
Baud
@satby:
Right after we’re complaining.
FlyingToaster (Tablet)
Well, it mostly works on my tablet. I’ll send bug reports to the usual place.
Baud
satby
As to the hearings, the first day went just as expected. The Republicans were asses and showed it. I wonder how many foreign services folks watching the shameful treatment of two of their kind will ever vote R again. Less than before, I have no doubt.
satby
@NotMax: thanks! I’ll keep that in mind for when I replace my TV.
I haven’t yet because, honestly I can watch on my tablet just as easily so I’m reluctant to spend the money right now.
danielx
It won’t be an official site launch until Cole officially tells us all to go fuck ourselves.
debbie
@ Baud:
Don’t let Nunes know!
Last night, I tried posting a couple tweets and they were blocked. I wanted to point to a third one, where someone Photoshopped in a cow costume on Nunes while he gave his opening statement at the hearing. It was hilarious!
Nicole
I am now thinking that is not possible in a lot of cases. I read The Future Is History last year, about the period roughly between the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Putin, and what I took from the book was that Russia never had a chance in hell of becoming anything resembling a free democracy- the populace’s world view had been too shaped by 70-odd years of Soviet propaganda and culture (and czarist, before that). Their minds could not grasp a Western style democracy; the framework just wasn’t there. I compare that to Americans who have now had 30-odd years of FOX News shaping their world view (and 400+ years of racism before that).
I’m not saying the nation is lost (the USA does not have a history of authoritarian regimes, which is why I am hopeful we’ll continue to see pushback against the current would-be one), but I think a lot of Americans are permanently lost. Their world view is not shiftable. And the worst ones are going to be the younger ones, who don’t remember a time before FOX News.
NotMax
@satby
Neglected to mention that the Classic Movie Vault channel also includes some rarely listed ‘race movies’ scattered throughout the various categories.
As for a TV, Black Friday/Cyber Monday is a-coming. ;) One go-to site to check out offerings in advance as the info is released.
Steeplejack (phone)
@rikyrah:
Good morning. 🙏
(Hmm, not preserving my nym or email on Android phone with Samsung browser.)
Armadillo
The Twitter embeds for Ann Laurie’s prior post still show up fine on Samsung Android and Windows laptop, both using Chrome. Just this current post where the embedded content showed up as code (and are now removed)
John S.
@JimV:
As Ron White is fond of saying, “you can’t fix stupid”. Even worse – stupid people have no sense of being stupid, and vastly underestimate their stupidity.
google.com/amp/s/www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/post-tribune/opinion/ct-ptb-david-rutter-stupidity-s…
Don’t take my word – it’s scientifically proven! And by famed social psychologist David Dunning no less, the co-inventor of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
satby
@NotMax: yeah, I was going to wait for that, since it’s not urgent.
It’s almost the middle of November and I can’t stand how fast it’s going by. I’m not ready for anything.
Mary G
It remembered my nym and emails for hours yay.
I still haven’t gotten to Twitler and Erdogan at all. Did he grovel for the dictator? Give him the nukes? Let his bodyguards beat the shit out of some tourists? Don’t tell me, I don’t wanna know.
debbie
(Hmm, no editing or replying)
@Mary G:
“Did he grovel for the dictator?”
Worse. He mispronounced his name (“Erdo-gone”).
satby
Well as fun as reading the new site is, I have to go get ready for the market. I’m hoping at some point it becomes fun again. Or that I don’t commit murder before I take a staycation in January. Either is possible, which occurs is a toss up.
mad citizen
Not max, I also appreciate the movie channel recommendations.
Steeplejack (phone)
@satby:
Good luck! Check your electrical outlets and give your neighbor a hard look for us all.
NotMax
@satby
Yup yup. There’s one item I’ve been jonesing for which normally retails for (IMHO) a pretty penny. Hoping to find it listed somewhere then at even a teensy discount. That would be enough to assuage the ingrained flagellation reaction over laying out money on something relatively expensive for myself.
satby
😂😂😂! I get to tell her to get an extension cord to plug her stuff into her own outlets today. She has 8 (!), so it’s not really a hardship.
The entire thing has me reevaluating whether I want to just retire entirely.
germy
When we bought our house a few years ago, we hired a surveyor to mark our property lines.
A few weeks later, I noticed our neighbor had moved one of the surveyor stakes closer to our house.
(Of course he’s a republican. Must be some sort of manifest destiny thing)
JMG
OK, this is my first exposure to the new design. I think it is very good looking, and I haven’t interacted enough with it yet to have any other opinion. Thanks to all involved for their hard work, whether I wind up liking all the changes or not. I’ll cope, don’t worry about it.
satby
Aw, lookit us all commenty and reply-y already!
change is hard, then it just starts to be normal.
satby
@germy: I had people do that repeatedly who moved in years after I did, to my surveyor stakes that had been in place for years.
germy
I posted a comment and was told I’m blocked.
Alrighty then.
ryk
De-lurking to say the new site looks awesome.
Also to thank the several jackals who recommended Jill Lepore’s These Truths a while back. I am enjoying it immensely.
eclare
Test
Spanky
Hmmmm. Either my nym was not remembered, or this is the first via the phone…
Agreed that the large swath of the Fox-viewing public will never be reachable, and the Murdochs need to pay for what they’ve wrought in the world.
AxelFoley
Well, well…I like what you’ve done with the place.
satby
Ok, I do notice that the comment and refresh buttons, which I always thought redundant anyway (I hate redundant, but not my blog), seem slower than just hitting the browser refresh. Haven’t used the comment one as I just wrote in the box when I want to say something.
I’m a simple soul.
Kay
@JimV:
It isn’t about smart, it’s about good.
One of the former Republicans on Twitter says Trump isn’t an IQ test, he’s a character test. Not the same thing.
Nicole
@satby:
Good. I was really indignant on your behalf when you posted that she was helping herself to your power outlet. That’s one of those, I recognize in the total time scheme, little rude things that I nevertheless have an outsize rage reaction to. IT’S NOT FAIR. AND IT’S TOTALLY A DICK MOVE.
Baud
@Kay: This.
Steeplejack (phone)
@Spanky:
Yeah, you have to stick your nym on each device that you use.
germy
The Young Turks guy is running for office?
Kay
@Baud:
I think Schiff understands it- I was struck by how much of his opening was devoted to “this behavior is wrong and bad for the country”. Not illegal. Not a list of facts and an analysis of whether they’re actionable under a federal criminal statute, but that they’re unethical and awful.
In a way he CAN do this because the facts are so plain and just about everyone has admitted them.
Argiope
OK, cows can swim? I was today years old when I learned this.
ETA as others have reported, replying to a specific post doesn’t capture the initial post. At least not on the first pass.
Argiope
@Argiope: second time hitting the reply is the charm if you want to capture the original post, at least on firefox. Also, the edit got glitchy for my original attempted reply to @Baud’s peripatetic cow story.
Mary G
I almost never buy campaign swag, but Elizabeth Warren has a coffee mug that says “billionaires tears” on it. Tempting.
Sab
@Kay: Stuart Stevens, who is still a Republican and an unrelenting Not Trumper.
I can’t think why he is still a Republican, except that he has always been, and he is loyal.
He was pretty early as a Souhern Democrat switching to Republicans. In his case I think it is because he and his family are Mississipians but not racists. They bailed from the Dixiecrats, joined the Republican party, and here they are on the other side. So he bailed with Trump because Trump’s thinking is why he stopped being a Democrat in his youth.
I have peripherally been aware of his family forever. My sister and his sister went to the same DC boarding school. I met her when I was 13 and she was 16.
I follow him because he is still on the other side but moral, not racist, believes in the Constitution, etc. These are the people our people used to talk to, who have since been run out of or bailed from their party.
My county is heavily Democratic. One party political systems and parties are inherently corrupt. I look north to the next county that’s all D (Cuyahoga) and utterly corrupt. My sister lives in Mass and is a Republican because the Dems are so corrupt. I fear for my own local politics.
I am afraid of that corruption infecting my own part (local Dems.)
Daniel'sBob
@germy: He committed two crimes–trespassing and moving a surveyor-placed stake.
Of course, IOKIYAR
Gin & Tonic
@JMG:
But that’s not the B-J way.
NotMax
@Mary G
Stashed away somewhere in this place is a Tippecanoe And Tyler Too silk bookmark I once found inside a 19th century book.
Baud
@Sab:
There are corrupt D’s but there are a lot of corrupt Rs too. I don’t know why we get tagged with that label. Maybe because our voters actually care about it.
Gin & Tonic
Just got a text from my son – he has landed in Kyiv. Propitious time to be moving to Ukraine, no? At least one of the benefits of the events of recent months is he didn’t have to answer the previously inevitable question of “Ukraine? Where’s that?”
Immanentize
Hello All,
Old me on new site. Exciting!
I 💖 Watergirl (et al.)
Sab
@Baud: Exactly. They don’t even care anymore. Per them: if you aren’t corrupt then you are a chump.
Baud
@germy: Same guy that ran in the California primary?
Immanentize
I have no idea what this means. It is really bullshit. She is a Republican because she wants to be a Republican.
Immanentize
@Gin & Tonic:. How exciting for him! And you get to visit. I hope he isn’t planning on talking to the President on a cell phone in a Kyiv restaurant..
Kay
@Sab:
I think it’s an important distinction because “smart” or “educated” does not guarantee good character. That’s a category error that we seem to make a lot. The response to “Mike Pompeo is dishonest and is acting as an employee of Donald Trump” shouldn’t be “but he went to West Point!” That’s not the issue.
Immanentize
Hmm just got a glitch in the Matrix.
Snarki, child of Loki
Even now, Schiff oils the spit.
Sab
@Mary G: I want one, but I already bought a persist.
ETA: spouse thinks (correctly) we haave too many mugs.
Hillary had the best ice-scraper from car windshields I have ever had -’08 primary. Bought 12 of them. Kept three in the family, gave others to people I knew. Everyone who wanted one was a middle-aged black woman. They all voted Hillary in the primary, Obama in the general.
The ones who are still alive are still proudly using their Hillary icescrapers, and still all over the map politically (Biden, Warren, Harris.)
Gin & Tonic
@Immanentize: I doubt it – he and Trump don’t have much in common. On the other hand, he’s met with William Taylor several times and has been highly impressed. Taylor is pretty much exactly what you see.
NotMax
@Immanentize
Does the new blog make me look fat?
:)
Immanentize
No, I think it is very slimming!
Immanentize
@NotMax: that last comment was for you…. It seems my “reply” buttons are like at 75%.
zhena gogolia
@Gin & Tonic:
I’m afraid they still don’t know where Украина is. (see, we can do Cyrillic! Sorry for spelling it in Russian.)
Sab
I agree. I have never seen signs of character in Pompeo.
I am just saying, in my Ohio, heavily Democratic county, we have always battled corruption. Which was usually us.
The big change is that we used to look at Republicans as clean but clueless about government, because they didn ‘t actually need it except for roads.
For the last few decades, they haven’t been clueless or clean. Just corrupt.
zhena gogolia
It still doesn’t bump me back to my comment when I post. I have to refresh. And the button on the left juts into the comment box and obscures some of the text in people’s comments.
I appreciate everyone’s hard work, and I’m sure it’s better for some people. I didn’t have that many problems with the old site, so I’m not in seventh heaven.
debit
I almost always hate change but I like the new design. Feels very much like the old place, but spiffed up. Thumbs up!
And it remembered me AND I can edit. Fancy!
Betty Cracker
@Immanentize: My info on Massachusetts politics is 30 years out of date, but when I lived there in the late 80s/early 90s, the Democrats were widely perceived as corrupt. Whitey Bulger’s brother ran the statehouse, IIRC. It didn’t turn me into a Republican, but I had no illusions about my reps. Maybe things have changed? I hope so.
Kay
@Gin & Tonic:
The best questions in the Democrat’s part of the hearing were the variants on “has this ever happened before?”
From both men, no hesitation and no qualifying, “no”. The Trump Administration is a one-off on corruption in their long careers. The worst. A new low. Taylor’s recitation of how he came to the realization of how bad it was very powerful, I thought. He couldn’t put the pieces together because this was so far outside his normal experience with other administrations that he was resisting the idea that it could be true.
Betty Cracker
@Gin & Tonic: One thing Americans are learning from the current scandal: how to spell and pronounce Kyiv (KEEV). I notice most publications are dropping the definite article before Ukraine too, though not all…
NotMax
@Kay
Connecting the
dotssplotches.Sab
@Immanentize: She is a Republican because she thinks the Democrats are amazingly corrupt.
She loves Weld.
I don’t live in Mass, and I see Sott Brown as more typical, but there she is.
I worry about that in my own county, but not so much, because our Republicans are so corrupt that anything the Dems do pales in comparison.
That is not a good look for any party or either party, but that is where we are, at least in my county.
One party rule is utterly corrupting. But when the other party’s raison d’etre is corruption, that limits everyone’s options.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: Agreed. I just hope that resonated with at least some people who hadn’t been following the story closely — how completely astounded and aghast the State Dept. people were at Trump’s ham-handed self-dealing.
The Republicans are scumbags, but I give them credit for riding the Hunter Biden story for all it’s worth. It’s bullshit, and there’s no evidence Hunter did anything illegal, and Joe’s actions would have harmed Hunter’s interests rather than helping them, as I understand it. Still, the whole thing is vaguely sleazy in a way that will resonate with cynical, low-info voters.
zhena gogolia
@Betty Cracker:
KEEV isn’t exactly right either. Pronounce it the way you would have before (two syllables), but make the second syllable another EE. KEEyeev or something like that.
Gin & Tonic
@zhena gogolia: Yes on the Cyrillic. I spent a lot of time with WaterGirl during the testing phase on that (well, not just on Cyrillic, but on non-Latin scripts.) It proved to be pretty complicated.
Immanentize
@Betty Cracker: Yes, that is 30 years old information. Yes things are very different now than then just like things were different then from 30 years before that when Curley still wielded power. And Billy Bulger was certainly powerful but he wasn’t as corrupt as others who followed him (I.e. Finnernan) but the biggest complaint about Billy has always been that he was Whitey’s brother.
And Long Island Republicans were completely corrupt for decades. And let’s not even start on Florida thirty years ago.
My point is that people dont change their party because of corruption in their own party. Especially in Mass. The Republicans are just as corrupt, if not more so than Democrats, and crazy and mean here. Just like everywhere.
To be a Republican is to want to be a Republican, not because Democrats made you do it.
NotMax
@zhena gogolia
It will always be chicken Kiev, however, much as it is with Peking duck.
;)
Sab
Blew you off because you are new to Mass. I don’t even live there and my sis is a political idiot ( ie not actually interested or informed.) Longtime been there.
You are informed, but new.
You know more than me, but I have my sis.
Gin & Tonic
@zhena gogolia: It’s really difficult to put it phonetically in a way that English-only people can understand. It is two syllables, with accent on the first, but the vowel sound of the letter И in Ukrainian is more like the short “i” in “if.” The origin of the name is after the prince named Кий, (Kyj, or Kyy, I guess)
Ramalama
This site is so shiny. Love it.
Please let me be the first to notify youse all that a drag queen appeared at the Impeachment hearing.
While I am not a drag queen, I have a special affinity for them, since this world-wide drag organization awarded me a scholarship to help keep me in college. Serious. They were doing a lot of fund-raising for people with AIDS. But one member, a drag king, wanted to do something for .. students. I found the ad in the back of a gay newspaper that I found while with my roommate in a gay cowboy bar in Denver. It was very interesting getting letters of recommendation for this thing.
Gin & Tonic
@Ramalama: That is an amazing story.
NotMax
@Ramalama
Strictly for funsies, gotta link it (possibly NSFW).
Bex
Me too. It gets better when the comment number is three digits, but still should be fixed.
Betty Cracker
@zhena gogolia: Fortunately for the prospects of not making a fool of myself publicly, I anticipate no occasion on which I’ll be called upon to pronounce it correctly.
@Immanentize:
I think that’s probably true in general, especially when people switch parties rather than switching to no party affiliation. But I know plenty of folks who’ve done the latter because they don’t want to be associated with either party.
Immanentize
@Betty Cracker: probably also true of “unaffiliated” religious folks.
Ramalama
@NotMax I don’t miss a lot of things being kind of sequestered in the woods of a French speaking town but the antics of a drag show is one of those things. Queen of the Delicatessen: Virginia Hamm, for the win.
Ramalama
@Gin & Tonic: Thank you. I keep threatening to write about it. I think this might be a good time!
trnc
I don’t disagree with Dunning’s overall concept (after all, that would be stupid of me), but I think either the research or this story is glib. I know plenty of smart people who believe stupid crap. Everyone has some kind of blind spot, so people who may know a lot about something can pretty easily rationalize that they know other things. That may be the biggest cause for political disconnects – “I can grow enough corn to feed this whole town. Why should I listen to some PhD who never made anything in his life.” Unfortunately, we have a media that expects one side to listen to the other side exclusively and never seems to demand vice versa.
Obviously, the trick is to know and admit to yourself and others that you don’t know much about some things. That’s all I know.
trnc
@Kay:
Which is one more piece of evidence that republicans are shedding crocodile tears over process. How many processes have they shivved in the last 10 years (at least)?