Odds and Ends

Online Vs. Print

I blogged earlier about Slate's little experiment in which a couple of journalists got their news for a few days from print and a couple who got their news only online. There is an audio here of their discussion after the experiment. Listen for a long time (only moderately painful) and you'll struggle to hear a conclusion or answer other than the sense of frustration by both sides as to the limitations of using only one source. I think that sums it up nicely. Today's informed individual relies on a gumbo of print, online, television, and radio, but these are not real people talking, they're journalists, so I doubt the frustrations they felt would be shared by a typical person.

Today's Idiot Box

This columnist, with ties to my college. Read it and weep for cogent thought and the English language.

Good Blog

A doctoral student blogs about research here. Good stuff. The latest piece discusses research on interpersonal networks. I'd like to see more PhD students doing this sort of thing, in part as a mental exercise, in part sharing significant research with the rest of the world.

Tax Cuts and Trust

And speaking of significant research, a Public Opinion Quarterly piece examines the role of political trust in support for tax cuts. Trust plays a significant role among liberals in support of tax cuts, but not so much among conservatives and moderates (who, let's face it, tend to like them anyway). As an aside, if I'm reading the tables correctly, the more knowledgeable you are, the less supportive you are of tax cuts. That's kinda interesting. Unfortunately the authors did not include media variables.

What Congressmen Know

Comparisons between the economic mess now and The Great Depression are nothing new, but a GOP congressman shows just how much history he knows this week when he blamed President Franklin Roosevelt for the Depression.

According to history scholar U.S. Rep. Steve Austria of Ohio:

"When (President Franklin) Roosevelt did this, he put our country into a Great Depression," Austria told the Dispatch as he criticized the economic stimulus package currently moving through Congress. "He tried to borrow and spend, he tried to use the Keynesian approach, and our country ended up in a Great Depression. That's just history."

Um, no. That's not history. Alert, brainiac -- the Depression started in 1929. Roosevelt took office in January of 1933. Listen to his comments.

Alert number 2: "Freshman Congressman Steve Austria conceded today that President Franklin D. Roosevelt did not cause the Great Depression."

Whew.

Okay, so our history major is a Republican and Roosevelt was a Democrat whose Fair Deal looks similar to what Obama is trying. Clearly there are politics at play here, so much so that this guy let his political predispositions get in the way of clear thinking. Even regular people do this -- misspeaking to make a political point, even if a bad one, remembering things in ways that fit our predispositions. This guy just gets to be the ass of the week.

Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, start your engines...