oh dear

i loved how bush in his address to the nation last night referred to a global economic meltdown as a "distressing scenario". also, i think he should blush when he uses the phrase "hard-earned money." that having been said, i must admit that i think that was the best speech qua speech i have ever heard him give, in that he seemed actually to have understood what he was saying.

register to vote online

hey lazy people!

especially young virginians!

you can register to vote online!

click here

pass it on....

east river park

you can finally sit by the water in the east river park. it must have happened at some point this summer; i had stopped going.

we had shaved ice. (i asked this gentleman's permission to take his picture.)


tamarindo.

on the way home, we stopped and got a burger, even though we had some lovely local fish in the fridge for dinner. we're bad, but we spied this new place, black iron burger shop, on e. 5th st between avenues A and B, and had to try it. warren, newly carnivorous, aspires to be a burger connoisseur.

decent.

i'm just sayin'

this study, reported in the washington post, shows that republicans are even more likely to believe political misinformation when they have been shown evidence that it is wrong than they were before the misinformation was corrected.

"Political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler provided two groups of volunteers with the Bush administration's prewar claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. One group was given a refutation -- the comprehensive 2004 Duelfer report that concluded that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction before the United States invaded in 2003. Thirty-four percent of conservatives told only about the Bush administration's claims thought Iraq had hidden or destroyed its weapons before the U.S. invasion, but 64 percent of conservatives who heard both claim and refutation thought that Iraq really did have the weapons. The refutation, in other words, made the misinformation worse."

link to actual duke university paper

this study, cited in newsweek, shows that conservatives are more likely to be afraid of pictures of threatening things, like spiders, than liberals.