Ruth Marcus applauds Kaci Hickox.
Thank you, Kaci Hickox.
You did the world a service in traveling to Sierra Leone to care for Ebola patients. Then you did your country a service in standing up for rationality.
It might have been easier to go along with the unnecessary quarantine. After all, as New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) observed with his usual sensitivity when Hickox was being detained in his state, “She was inside the hospital in a climate-controlled area with access to her cellphone, access to the Internet and takeout food from the best restaurants in Newark.”
Instead, Hickox made a brave, and useful, stink — and, as her bike ride watched round the world demonstrates, continues to do so.
We are fortunate that there are a few Americans who will not indulge magical thinking. Who understand that surrendering freedom to protect the public is a stance that should be carefully weighed, and that surrendering freedom to indulge political pressures and media-generated fear should never be tolerated. We're unlucky that that there are only a few.
People are understandably concerned about Ebola. Politicians are understandably responding to those concerns. But they also owe the public the duty to combat fear with facts and to tailor the public health response to the scientific evidence.
Anyone shaking their fists as Hickox is facing the wrong way.
Leonard Pitts on how we are insulated from what's really happening.
You can’t handle the truth.
There is a temptation to take that line from Jack Nicholson — snarled at Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men — as the moral of the story, the lesson to be learned from a new study on trustworthiness and the news media.
The study, conducted by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, informs us that America’s least-trusted news source is conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh, rated unreliable by almost 40 percent of all Americans. The also conservative Fox “News” follows closely at 37 percent. So America’s least-trusted news sources are also its most popular; Limbaugh hosts the number one show on radio and Fox is the highest-rated cable news outlet.
It gets better. Pew tells us America’s most trusted news source is CNN; the network that eschews any ideological identifier is considered reliable by 54 percent of us. Yet for as much as we supposedly trust it, we don’t seem to like it very much. Its ratings — despite a mild resurgence in recent months — are but a fraction of Fox’s and it is undergoing massive layoffs.
For what it’s worth, there’s evidence to support America’s perception of who is and is not trustworthy. PunditFact, an offshoot of PolitiFact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking website, has issued a report card on the truthfulness of broadcast pundits by network. It’s an imperfect measure, but the results are still compelling. Over 60 percent of Fox pundit statements rated by PunditFact have been found to be some flavor of false.
That flavor? A mixture of old cheese and shoe polish.
Okay, come on in and read the rest.
The New York Times looks at the relationship between governor's races and taxes.
There is only so long a governor can do great damage to a state before voters start to demand a change. In Kansas, Gov. Sam Brownback, a Republican who has driven down his state’s credit rating and cratered its budget with ill-advised tax cuts, is paying a huge price in popularity for his actions.
Mr. Brownback was elected in 2010 with 63 percent of the vote, but the latest NBC News/Marist poll shows him with only 43 percent support for re-election on Tuesday, a point behind his Democratic opponent, Paul Davis. “He’s leading Kansas down,” one regular Republican voter told a New York Times reporter a few weeks ago. “We’re going to be bankrupt in two or three years if we keep going his way.”
Mr. Brownback is not the only Republican governor who is struggling this year because extreme policies have failed. Some of the country’s most damaging governors are caught in tossup races with Democrats, fighting for re-election even while President Obama’s unpopularity has hurt his party’s chances of retaining the Senate.
What's amazing about that last paragraph? The word "tossup."
Frank Bruni indulges in the throw-the-bums-out fantasies.
Imagine a house ablaze. Now picture a team of firefighters pulling up to it. They behold the flames shooting through its roof. They feel its heat on their faces. And they get in position to fight it.
With squirt guns.
That house is America, and those rescuers are the candidates in these misbegotten midterms.
We’re living through a chapter of uncommonly durable and pronounced pessimism, when a majority of adults don’t think their kids will have as many opportunities as they did; when there’s waning faith in social mobility and a widening gap between rich and poor; when our standing in the world is diminished and our sense of insecurity has intensified accordingly; when the environment itself is turning on us and demanding the sorts of long-term adjustments we’ve seldom been good at.
We're in a period where one party has discovered they can benefit from sabotaging democracy. Until the media stops the polarized-government both-sides-do-it lie, things will not improve.
Ross Dothat is... ah, hell. Just read it.
The 2014 midterms have featured many variables and one constant. Whether they’re running as incumbents or challengers, campaigning in blue or red or purple states, Democratic candidates have all been dragging an anchor: a president from their party whose approval ratings haven’t been north of 45 percent since last October.
The interesting question is why. You may recall that Mitt Romney built his entire 2012 campaign strategy around the assumption that a terrible economy would suffice to deny Barack Obama a second term. Yet throughout 2012, with the unemployment rate still up around 8 percent, Obama’s approval numbers stayed high enough (the mid-to-upper 40s) to ultimately win. Whereas today the unemployment rate has fallen to 6 percent, a number Team Obama would have traded David Axelrod’s right kidney for two years ago, but the White House hasn’t benefited: The public’s confidence is gone, and it doesn’t seem to be coming back.
Here. I'll save you the trouble. Dothat discards the notion that a party intentionally screwing up the government and a media that continuously pretends that this isn't happening has nothing to do with it. Nope. It's because Obama is just not good. And Obamacare. Now don't say APR never did anything for you.
Wendy Williams and Stephen Ceci say that the image of how women are treated in science is due for an update.
Academic science has a gender problem: specifically, the almost daily reports about hostile workplaces, low pay, delayed promotion and even physical aggression against women. Particularly in math-intensive fields like the physical sciences, computer science and engineering, women make up only 25 to 30 percent of junior faculty, and 7 to 15 percent of senior faculty, leading many to claim that the inhospitable work environment is to blame.
Our country desperately needs more talented people in these fields; recruiting more women could address this issue. But the unwelcoming image of the sexist academy isn’t helping. Fortunately, as we have found in a thorough analysis of recent data on women in the academic workplace, it isn’t accurate, either.
There’s no argument that, until recently, universities deserved their reputations as bastions of male privilege and outright sexism. But times have changed. Many of the common, negative depictions of the plight of academic women are based on experiences of older women and data from before the 2000s, and often before the 1990s. That’s not to say that mistreatment doesn’t still occur — but when it does, it is largely anecdotal, or else overgeneralized from small studies. As we found, when the evidence of mistreatment goes beyond the anecdotal, it is limited to a small number of comparisons of men and women involving a single academic rank in a given field on a specific outcome.
Looking for a career that offers the chance to make a significant contribution and still provide the opportunity for a good life? Science.
Dana Milbank says help them Obi Rand, you're their only hope.
“The Republican Party brand sucks,” Republican Rand Paul said in Detroit last week.
This was candid, and correct: Though the GOP will make gains in Tuesday’s midterm elections, its long-term prospects are grim because young people, women and minorities don’t feel welcome in the party.
But Paul thinks he can make the Republican brand stop sucking, or at least suck less. The senator from Kentucky is preparing a 2016 presidential run based on a gamble that his libertarian policies can appeal to young people and minorities. And a poll out this week gave a big boost to Paul’s rationale for running.
The Institute of Politics at Harvard’s Kennedy School released a survey of millennial voters showing that this 18- to 29-year-old demographic, a rock-solid Democratic constituency a few years ago, is now up for grabs. If this is true, the Republican Party, in the right hands, might be able to defuse the demographic time bomb ticking at party headquarters.
If this is true, I'm taking that job offer in Canada.
Griffith University researchers indicate that the multiverse may be odder than we suspected–and not so neatly walled off from our own universe.
Griffith University academics are challenging the foundations of quantum science with a radical new theory based on the existence of, and interactions between, parallel universes.
In a paper published in the journal Physical Review X, Professor Howard Wiseman and Dr Michael Hall from Griffith's Centre for Quantum Dynamics, and Dr Dirk-Andre Deckert from the University of California, take interacting parallel worlds out of the realm of science fiction and into that of hard science.
The team proposes that parallel universes really exist, and that they interact. That is, rather than evolving independently, nearby worlds influence one another by a subtle force of repulsion. They show that such an interaction could explain everything that is bizarre about quantum mechanics.
I like this theory, if only because I'm still in search of something that cleans up all the mess of quantum, standard model, dark energy trinity that currently holds sway. There's no reason the universe(s) should actually operate according to rules that meet my idea of order, but it would be nice if that was so.