I read things like this and get reminded of the 2002 Economist article that reported “Experts seem to agree that Americans find it harder than most people to evaluate risks accurately.” Unfortunately, a lot of this is ignorance and a active avoidance of real data, statistics, and research. We like getting our news in sound bites.

Lou Dobbs is a racist, or at least knowingly fronts for racist organizations. Nice job, CNN.

Ew.

This is just sad. (found via MyLeftNutmeg)

How do you maintain the outrage when nearly everything causes some?

Excerpt:

SMART gamblers know when to quit and when to hold their nerve and let bets run. The holders and folders who invest in internet gambling firms were given much to ponder with the arrest in America on Sunday July 16th of David Carruthers. The British chief executive of BetonSports was detained while changing planes in Texas en route from London to the online gambling firm’s base in Costa Rica. The next day many shareholders showed they weren’t prepared to risk their investments. Shares in BetonSports plunged. So did the value of other online firms that rely on American punters.

…

But the relevant laws largely predate the internet era. Legal opinion is divided over the extent to which the 1961 Wire Act, a statute designed to stop gambling over the phone, can be applied to betting over the internet. In this case, that may not matter. BetonSports—unlike most of its rivals—takes wagers both online and over the phone. Moreover, it accepts bets on American sports events as well as running casino-type games. Though BetonSports faces charges concerning both types of gambling, other online firms that do not run a sports book remain confident that they are safe from prosecution.

Excerpt:

Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama also want to save on health care. But rather than capping jury awards, they hope to cut the number of medical malpractice cases by reducing medical errors, as they explain in an article in the New England Journal of Medicine. In other words, to the Republicans, suits and payouts are the ill. To the Democrats, the problem is a slew of medical injuries of which the suits are a symptom.
The latest evidence shows the Democrats’ diagnosis to be right.

The best attempt to synthesize the academic literature on medical malpractice is Tom Baker’s The Medical Malpractice Myth, published last November. Baker, a law professor at the University of Connecticut who studies insurance, argues that the hype about medical malpractice suits is “urban legend mixed with the occasional true story, supported by selective references to academic studies.” After all, including legal fees, insurance costs, and payouts, the cost of the suits comes to less than one-half of 1 percent of health-care spending. If anything, there are fewer lawsuits than would be expected, and far more injuries than we usually imagine.

More on this later.

Excerpt:

Well, we’re laughing. Don’t we count? The reason we laugh is that, first of all, even if it were true, this would be a fairly modest achievement. Halving a deficit you inherited would be something to brag about. Halving a deficit you created, not so much. You don’t see Bush’s former chief domestic policy adviser Claude Allen boasting that he has returned half the merchandise he filched from Target. 

Second, it’s not true. In 2004, the Bush administration released a suspiciously high deficit projection for 2004. Every other sentient budget analyst at the time said the number was inflated. (The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, for instance, wrote, “The Administration appears to have noticeably overstated the deficit for the current year, 2004.”) Why would it inflate the number? So that when the real figure came in below its phony prediction, it could claim progress. The trick was utterly obvious at the time. 

Another rundown of how the Estate Tax issue is not about middle class Americans no matter how broadly you define middle class. There’s no definition of the middle class that encompasses Paris Hilton, for example.

Excerpt:

A few weeks ago, I wrote a column about a paper that decimated the conservative worldview. The study, by William Niskanen of the Cato Institute, found that the conservative “starve the beast” strategy does not work. Indeed, since 1981, he found that tax cuts tend to produce more spending, while tax hikes produce less.

I wrote that it would be interesting to see how conservatives reacted to having the factual basis for their entire domestic strategy exposed as a fraud. And it is interesting because “starve the beast” is so central to the GOP approach to governing and because the reaction is a case study in how the conservative movement reacts when its views are disproved.

Well, the right has had sufficient time to formulate its response. The results aren’t very impressive.

excerpt:

Arethas isn’t the only student to be disciplined for what he posted to his MySpace profile. The past few years have seen an explosion in the number of schools taking to the Web to find out what students are saying and doing. And punishment has followed, from a Pennsylvania school that suspended one student for creating a parody MySpace profile of his principal to a California school that suspended 20 students simply for viewing one student’s MySpace profile, which contained threats against another student. And some public school systems, like Illinois’ Community High School District 128, are even taking steps to monitor everything their students say on sites like MySpace. According to the Chicago Tribune, under new guidelines, students who participate in extra-curricular activities will need to sign a pledge in which they agree that the school can discipline them if it finds evidence that they have posted any “illegal or inappropriate” material online. Even some police are beginning to patrol MySpace, seeing the site as an effective tool for catching teenage criminals.