Conservatives that believe in climate change!

Tom Friedman found conservatives that believe climate change is real! Unfortunately, they live in Australia and New Zealand. Friedman makes some great points comparing Australian and Kiwi conservatives with their American counterparts:

"Indeed, to go from America — amid the G.O.P. primaries — to Down Under is to experience both jet lag and a political shock. In New Zealand and Australia, you could almost fit their entire political spectrum — from conservatives to liberals — inside the U.S. Democratic Party.

Or as Paul Quinn, a parliamentarian from New Zealand’s conservative National Party, once told a group of visiting American Fulbright scholars: “I will explain to you how our system works compared to yours: You have Democrats and Republicans. My Labor opponents would be Democrats. I am a member of the National Party, and we would be ... Democrats” as well.

For instance, there is much debate here over climate policy — Australia has a carbon tax, New Zealand has cap and trade — but there is no serious debate about climate science. Whereas in today’s G.O.P. it is political suicide to take climate change seriously, in Australia and New Zealand it is political suicide for conservatives not to."

He also touches briefly on mandatory voting in Australia and New Zealand and how it forces politicians to pander to the center rather than the extremes. It is a big reason both parties in both countries down under support climate change legislation and single-payer health care systems. Mandatory voting is a great idea that, unfortunately, will never fly in the United States.

"If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine."

Be careful SCOTUS. The Affordable Care Act is like Obi-wan Kenobi:

"If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine."

Why? Because if you can't devise a regulated, free market solution for a public good that comprises one-sixth of the American economy, the only available alternative becomes a Single-Payer "Medicare for All" plan.

Gail Collins of The New York Times agrees:

"It was basically a Republican idea to begin with, and look what happened. If this is thrown out in court, compromise will never get any traction again. Single payer! Single payer! Maybe you could have wooed me into the middle a few years ago, but no more. No more. Next time around we stop talking about complicated reforms and just go with Medicare for everybody."

How Red or Blue is your American English accent?

Fascinating article about how regional accents can be influenced by the political preferences of people living in that region:

"Labov points out that the residents of the Inland North have long-standing differences with their neighbors to the south, who speak what’s known as the Midland dialect. The two groups originated from distinct groups of settlers; the Inland Northerners migrated west from New England, while the Midlanders originated in Pennsylvania via the Appalachian region. Historically, the two settlement streams typically found themselves with sharply diverging political views and voting habits, with the northerners aligning much more closely with agenerally being more liberal ideology.

Labov suggests that it’s these deep-seated political disagreements that create an invisible borderline barring the encroachment of Northern Cities Vowels. When he looked at the relationship between voting patterns by county over the last three Presidential elections and the degree to which speakers in these counties shifted their vowels, he found a tight correlation between the two."

The writer goes on to discuss how politicians have leveraged accents, such as George W. Bush's {fake} Texas accent and Barack Obama's {fake} Chicago accent.

Tell the Supreme Court: I support Health Care Reform!

Tell the Supreme Court: I support Health Care Reform!: Tell the Supreme Court: I support Health Care Reform!: http://dccc.org/support-hcr

A Great Map of the Diversity of American Last Names

A blog post and interactive map at National Geographic show the distribution of last names in the United States. A very fascinating map, especially that pocket of the Vietnamese last name 'Nguyen' in California.

However, the blog post also states:

"The map's scale matters too. "If we did a map of New York like this," says project member James Cheshire, "the diversity would be phenomenal"—a testament to that city's role as a once-and-present gateway to America."

This is especially true considering Asians and Latinos comprise, respectively, 13% and 29% of New York City's population but are not very well represented and distributed among the American population as a whole.

Some interesting graphs about mortality

Go to the post for an explanation on these graphs or read the whole 100+ page paper itself.

Blue Jersey:: Upendra Chivukula Running for Congress in CD7

From Blue Jersey:

"[Assemblyman Upendra Chivukula] is Deputy Speaker in the Assembly, where he has served in the Assembly in the district stretching across Middlesex and Somerset for 10 years. He is an electrical engineer by education, and was council member then mayor of Franklin Twp. (Somerset) before his election to the Assembly.

Chivukula is first Indian-American elected to the New Jersey General Assembly in its history, and only the 4th Indian-American in the United States to be elected to state office."

Awesome Fake Movie Trailer Advertising the New York Public Library

Check out the really cool fake suspense trailer advertising the Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy at the New York Public Library. I wish they did cool stuff like this when I worked there.

Bill Maher NYT Op-Ed: Please Stop Apologizing

Bill Maher had an op-ed in Wednesday's New York Times about the quasi-outrage over everything these days. As usual, he makes some good points:

"The answer to whenever another human being annoys you is not “make them go away forever.” We need to learn to coexist, and it’s actually pretty easy to do. For example, I find Rush Limbaugh obnoxious, but I’ve been able to coexist comfortably with him for 20 years by using this simple method: I never listen to his program. The only time I hear him is when I’m at a stoplight next to a pickup truck.

When the lady at Costco gives you a free sample of its new ham pudding and you don’t like it, you spit it into a napkin and keep shopping. You don’t declare a holy war on ham."

My only issue with the op-ed is it reads like one of his "New Rules" on 'Real Time with Bill Maher'. So if this is the same New Rule I'm going to hear on Friday night, I'm going to be really disappointed.

Sports fans = Prison inmates? Bill James thinks so.

Bill James writes a very interesting piece on Grantland about how the deterioration of fan conduct at baseball games and prisons in America seems to have happened around roughly the same time. A great tidbit that stood out:

"That's the thing about regulating conduct; there is always some conduct that doesn't get policed. When baseball effectively prohibited its players from defending their good names with physical threats and small weapons, this in essence required the players to put up with verbal abuse from fat, pimply guys whom they could have very easily beaten the grits out of. People say things in public all the time now for which, if you had said them 40 years ago, somebody would have kicked your ass. We've regulated the ass-kicking, so the rudeness is out of control, and we wind up with Keith Olbermann and Rush Limbaugh doing political commentary that falls in the same general class as drunken, shirtless bellowing.

I used to know both of those guys. Limbaugh used to work for the Royals. I didn't really know him, but I bumped into him a couple of times. Olbermann used to be a broadcaster; funny, funny guy. They're good guys; I wouldn't have any trouble playing poker with either one of them, but I'm not sure what moron gave either one of them a microphone.

Which is an unfair thing to say; they have complex political philosophies, both of them, and they have microphones because somebody figured out that you could make a lot of money by combining a sophisticated political philosophy with oral flatulence. But I was reminiscing about the good old days, when men were men and high school girls didn't have nipple rings, and you knew who the heavyweight boxing champion of the world was — even the high school girls did — because there was only one at a time and he was a big deal."

He goes on about a number of topics that don't seem related at first but overall it's a good piece worth reading.

Indiawest: Louisiana Gets State’s First Asian, Indian American Judge

Congratulations, your honor.

Hey, Mets! I Just Can’t Quit You. | NYT's David Brooks

David Brooks, who usually writes about politics, wrote about his love for the New York Mets today. He shared this great recent experience:

"I was in the media center of the Mets spring training facility in Florida this week when Ron Darling, the excellent pitcher from the great teams of the 1980s, sat down at the table next to me and started reading The Times. That was a vivid moment, evoking all sorts of memories, though I didn’t try to talk with him."

Knowing Darling's Yale pedigree (with degrees in both French and Southeast Asian History), Brooks probably could have engaged him in an interesting foreign affairs discussion. At the very least Ron Darling would likely know who David Brooks is.

However there is something endearing about this experience of a well-known and respected journalist (whom I totally respect even though I don't often agree with him) just being a fan around a former All-Star from his favorite team.

The White House is good at this sport called 'Politics'...

Matt Miller's latest Washington Post column talks about the White House's recent tactics that truly exemplify 'The Sport of Politics':

"What a coincidence that President Obama’s first news conference in nearly six months just happened to fall on Super Tuesday! And what a twist of fate that the president found himself addressing the United Auto Workers conference last week on the very day of the Michigan primary, where he had the chance to blast an unnamed GOP candidate for saying we should have “let Detroit go bankrupt.”

Barack Obama is the new master of the “split screen.” The White House is managing the president’s schedule and activities so that major events on the GOP campaign calendar become chances to contrast the president in the news cycle with the frivolous, shrill and increasingly surreal Republican race. The targets of this campaign are the independent voters who will decide the November election.

The “split-screen” strategy is looking very effective so far."

More reasons for why the filibuster is bad.

Ezra Klein with a blog post on why the filibuster promotes partisanship:

"The crucial idea here is that it is very different to kill a bill than to vote against a bill. When the minority party kills a bill, they have made the majority into a failure. And when voters perceive the majority as failing, they vote in the other guys. If you’re in the minority, there’s no faster path back to power than killing bills."