From the "I'm Not Sure I Should Share This" file: a Yale study suggests we can more easily convert conservatives into liberals merely by first making conservatives feel safe. But the Yale study appears to have converted conservatives into social liberals, which seems to be an easier lift than turning them into economic ones. And even though I've long believed that most folks' emotional attachment to racism and nativism is actually pretty soft, we also have to remember that their newfound sense of safety (and thus their newfound attachment to openness) can be pretty soft, too, if they and their communities don't tend to it properly.
This really should be said a lot more often: "Bake Sales Can’t Fix This: Corporate Tax Cuts Leave Public Schools Desperate." No, really: I've had people tell me the answer to public school funding problems is to get a corporation to donate sports uniforms. And too many of the folks who'd say that would read the tales of corporate donations and online funding platforms and foundational grants and say see? The free market provides! Except that, well, it doesn't, as anyone with more than a glancing relationship with arithmetic would tell you.
"The Science is Clear," declares Elizabeth Shogren and Susie Neilson at Wired, "Dirty Farm Water is Making Us Sick." You know, given how unpopular food poisoning is -- I mean, even our "liberal" media covers it pretty intensely! -- you'd think it'd be easier for enterprising Democrats to draw a direct line from the FDA's delay in implementing new irrigation water-testing rules to our present inability to get Romaine lettuce that doesn't make us violently ill. But Democrats are too afraid of big ag corporations to do that, even though there's a Mack truck-sized opening for the "reasonable," "moderate," "fiscally-sound" Democrat to point out that the FDA rule delay (by the FDA's own analysis!) will cost consumers nine times more money in health care costs than big ag corporations will save in rule-compliance costs. And though I expect the FDA's delay will get struck down in court one day, you won't get much comfort from that if you've died of kidney failure in the meantime.
Uh oh: a Sierra Club FOIA request turns up emails showing former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt actually getting interview questions in advance from Fox and Friends -- and, in at least one instance, he approved a part of the program's script. What will Fox News votaries say about this pattern of obvious collaboration between media and governmental officials, the kind of collaboration warned about in dystopian novels and anti-Communist screeds? They'll say oh, news programs ask pre-interview questions all the time, though they do that with folks hawking their new books, not public servants. I guess the more cynical among them will say you just know MSNBC did that with Obama, though a) "you just know" does not actually describe evidence of a thing and b) if that were true, would that make it right?
Finally, a Fox News personality exclaims on Twitter that seeing our military use tear gas on migrants attempting to cross the border was the "HIGHLIGHT" (caps in original) of her Thanksgiving weekend. I guess some people feel closest to the spirit of the holidays when they watch other people suffer. And did she call it a "HIGHLIGHT" on any of those days the Border Patrol used tear gas on migrants during the Obama Administration? Somehow, I doubt it -- you know liberals never get any love from right-wingers when they act like right-wingers. Anyway, you've heard of this Tomi Lahren, I trust? She's pretty notorious. I don't think we've covered her flatugasms before in this space. But I'm certain we won't be covering them again -- she is, like so many inexplicably well-paid monsters before her, dead to this blog.
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