Mind Blown

This is the most accurate chart I've seen in some time.

Listen To This!

Spoon frontman Britt Daniel has a new band... that sounds a little like Spoon.

But that is an unqualified compliment.

LISTEN

Missouri! (part 1364)

Only 24% of Missourians like Todd Akin.

But 44% still would vote for him.

What have we become?

Mr. Fascinating

• Karate champion.
• Fulbright scholar to M.I.T.
• Grace Jones's lover.
• Bouncer gig with Chazz Palmenteri.
• Andy Warhol subject.
• Stallone rival.
• Direct to video king.

It goes on, but you should just go read this article about Dolph Lundgren. Totally bizarre.

Accidental Honesty

Via Kevin Drum, I see that John Boehner accidentally expressed his views on the Tea Party when asked shy Paul Ryan would vote for TARP against the wished of the broader Tea Partiers.

He's got a very conservative voting record, but he's not a knuckle-dragger, all right?

Understood Mr. Speaker.

Three Fewer Steps

Usain Bolt is incredible. Yesterday, he won his fourth Olympic Gold in either of the two sprint races in the games. He dominated so thoroughly that he was able to pull up a bit at the end, a move that brought renewed calls of showboating from many. But those criticisms don't stop him from being arguably the greatest sprinter of all time.

One of Bolt's countrymen finished with the silver. His name is Yohan Blake, and Bolt himself named him the Beast because of his incredible work ethic. This work ethic has made him second best sprinter on the planet. But he isn't the best. He isn't because Bolt is, and Bolt is because he has the most natural athletic ability of any sprinter by a fair margin.

This is an excellent reminder for the folks who think their hard work, and their hard work alone, is the reason for their success. Talent in sports is pretty similar to advantage in life. Advantage - be it economic, educational, social, etc. - endows its possessor with an ability to either work less to achieve the same or to work equally hard and achieve more.

One of the facts NBC talked about during their coverage was that Bolt takes 41 strides in the 100 while almost all his competitors take 44. Those three fewer steps matter. In life, those three fewer steps might be a better school, or smarter parents, or a safer community, or any number of things. It is important for all of us to remember that we all owe some part of our successes to forces outside our control. We should always try to work to be the Beast, but we have to recognize that there is a little Bolt in every victory.

Something Your Probably Kind of Knew Already

Via The Plum Line, I see that there is a new book out on the stimulus that outlines the extent to which Republicans staked their political fortunes on screwing the president consequences for the country be damned.

“If he was for it, we had to be against it,” Voinovich tells Grunwald. And at another point, characterizing a strategy session Republicans and McConnell had held in early January of 2009, Voinovich said: “He wanted everyone to hold the fort. All he cared about was making sure Obama could never have a clean victory.”

Of course, this isnt' really news because McConnell himself has said that his top priority was denying the president a second term. Not fixing the economy, not worrying about the unemployed, not foreign threats, not anything. Just ruining the president. I am not sure I can think of a much more disgusting display of negligence among elected officials.

Missouri Has a Chance

Missouri has been working extremely hard at becoming a full-fledged backward state over the last decade or so. And now, after the Republican primary, we have a legitimate chance to represented in the Senate by someone who can make us the embarrassment we seem to long for.

Chick-Fil-A Part 2

The most accurate observation about the entire episode.

Via BuzzFeed.

Inequality Worse Than We Realize

From a Guardian story on a new report on tax havens...

The sheer size of the cash pile sitting out of reach of tax authorities is so great that it suggests standard measures of inequality radically underestimate the true gap between rich and poor. According to Henry's calculations, £6.3tn of assets is owned by only 92,000 people, or 0.001% of the world's population – a tiny class of the mega-rich who have more in common with each other than those at the bottom of the income scale in their own societies.

For the record £6.3tn equals about $9.8tn. By the way, tn is short for trillion. Also by the way, the entire U.S. GDP is about $15tn.

Chick-Fil-A and Me

1. I really despise Chick-Fil-A's politics. 2. I really love Chick-Fil-A's chicken. I suppose, interestingly enough, that the best way to describe my feelings about this are through a movie about two gay cowboys.

Missouri!

Missouri is -

Now unequivocally Republican.

And

Still making terrible headlines.

UPDATE: And a Congressmen from my old stomping grounds is still a moron.

And this:

In a World Where Opinions Didn't Mean More Than Reality...

...Mitt Romney probably couldn't hope to win an election with this as his tax plan:

“Even if tax expenditures are eliminated in a way designed to make the resulting tax system as progressive as possible, there would still be a shift in the tax burden of roughly $86 billion from those making over $200,000 to those making less than that amount,” the report reads.

Fortunately for Mitt, somebody somewhere will say that isn't true. Then we will spend all of our time talking about the persecution of Christians in America.