As with any popularization of a scientific paper, this must be approached with caution; a good paper always has to address the evidence against its findings, which never appear in the newspaper articles, which invariably deal in blacks and whites. That said, this article is better than most, giving some background; as would presumably be expected from Science Daily, rather than the National Enquirer.

Another study of the role of the culture war: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1871503&http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1871503 and James Hansen's observations from 1999 on why the US climate had failed to be as convincing as the global climate " Part of the "answer" is that U.S. climate has been following a different course than global climate, at least so far. ... The U.S. has warmed during the past century, but the warming hardly exceeds year-to-year variability. Indeed, in the U.S. the warmest decade was the 1930s and the warmest year was 1934. Global temperature, in contrast, had passed 1930s values by 1980 and the world has warmed at a remarkable rate over the last 25 years." ... More »

It's a polemic; beginning with a straw man, implying that Obama said that all millionaires pay less taxes than their secretaries; going on to say that "only" 1470 people with over $1 million income paid zero income taxes (!!), which of course is the exact kind of thing Obama would like to eliminate; muddying the waters by informing us that lots of "low and medium income households" also pay zero taxes (a family of two adults with two or more dependents making $50,000 or less) as if that were some sort of counterbalance to the millionaires mentioned; admitting that "for high-income families and individuals, investment income is often taxed at a lower rate than wages" (i.e. for wages greater than $34,500) but attempting to ... More »

More of a polemic based on a hypothetical Obama-free utopia than a clear eyed analysis of what is proved and what is not proved.

Krugman is absolutely right; following the link to Politifact, then following the link there to the CBO where the graph is, we find the following sentence: " It also includes the impact of the Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act of 2010 (referred to in this report as the 2010 tax act), enacted in December, which provides a short-term boost to the economy by reducing some taxes, extending unemployment benefits, and delaying an increase in taxes that would otherwise have occurred in 2011. " i.e., stimulus spending is already in those discretionary spending numbers.Just like the man said.

Sketchy, but does manage to present the Perry's actual pro-environmental actions amid the rest.

Interesting that the writer can say what is obvious to all outsiders; that although the US takes advantage of Saudi Arabia, it is not any different from the usual interaction between nations; if anything, America is more benign than most first world countries. The difficulties Saudi Arabia and the other Arabic countries find themselves in in the modern world are of their own making as much as anybody else's. And yet, he cannot (or will not) touch the self-destruct button of Arabic politics, Israel. Not to worry though; most of the commenters bring up Israel in response to this discourse on Saudi Arabia's internal problems; as though Saudi Arabia were right up there nearly as progressed as, say, Europe until 1948, when the ... More »

Points out something i had never really thought about. Nice insights.

It's a bit sketchy; a quicky interview, intended more to connect a couple of dots for the undecided than to convince anybody. But as far as it goes it does a pretty factual job.

USA Today has the correct analysis: SS's only problem is that the government has in the past borrowed so much money from it to paper over budget busters (starting with the Vietnam War) that now paying what it owes is daunting. It's like blaming the folks who Madoff scammed because he can't pay them what he owes.

In contrast with the "sky is falling"/"those old folks have to give up the cash" schools of reporting, this explains why SS' only failing is that it lent funds to an unreliable borrower, the US government.

Calling Obama a socialist is a sure sign that an author's compass has wandered from true. Of course, it allows one to call the healthcare reform bill Obamacare and label it as socialism, without having to note that it's authorship was mostly Bob Dole; this of course allows one to use said bill to "prove" Obama's socialism. And so it goes.

pretty onesided

As a geneticist in a former life, I realized a while back that just as one can trace the reproduction of a species by following a specific mutation, one can trace the parroting of a story on the Internet by following the spread of a specific error. As in, to be specific, the nonexistent "influential Israeli journalist, Ron Ren-Yishai", who apparently has been quoted almost 500,000 times according to Google, despite the difficult hurdle of his nonexistence. And always in the exact words of this "article", by which I mean no insult to actual articles. That's almost half a million bloggers who are happy to say anything showing Israel in a bad light, without niceties such as using Google to check primary sources. (For an exercise ... More »

It fails to check the sources; the Turkish Council of Forensic Medicine was condemned by Turkish medical associations, among others, for being an organ of the Turkish Ministry of Justice, which itself has subjugated "justice" to the whims of the regime to an extent which should appall anyone with any pretensions at being progressive. http://www.sundayszaman.com/sunday/detaylar.do?load=detay&link=160861 The author also fails to address (or perhaps has failed to notice) other problems with his pre-judicial verdict; how it is that this boat was treated so differently than the others, and the circulation of a video as "evidence of murder of Dorgan", which later proved to be constructed by out of sequence editing.

Same set of shibboleths as usual; unfortunately Chomsky does not provide sources or references for his bald statements regarding who walked out on talks, or the offer by the Arab nations to recognize Israel; which is therefore no more convincing than a similarly "everything you know is wrong!" unsupported broadside from a pro-Israel source would be. In addition, in this article Chomsky adopts the same "the world began in 1967" stance as most shallow "poor innocent Palestinian" commentators, reminiscing about the freedom the Palestinians had pre-1967 (when they were, of course, not at all free in their own state, but in fact had been annexed by Jordan for 20 years), without the slightest curiosity about what it was about the ... More »

this is an excellent and responsible opinion piece, showing both sides of the question, pros and cons. Rather than a polemic attempting to sway the reader to come down for one side or the other, it displays the complex mix of interpretations a healthy adult would have given a complex situation which has not presented a solution for over half a century.

It's a good job of connecting the dots, but lacks any form of skepticism; this would never constitute even the preponderance of evidence in a civil trial, for example. For instance, the author doesn't address the question of why Israel would so diligently guard the secret of their nuclear program, then offer to sell it. Or how the Defense Minister, typically very close to the Prime Minister in Israel, would go off on a tangent like this all the way to generating a paper trail on this top secret issue before discovering somewhat later that the Prime Minister would veto it. At very most, in such a case the Israeli Defense Minister might have a discussion with a foreign power so that the famous deniability could be maintained. And ... More »

Mr. Cox took the words right out of my keyboard: As usual, the Economist has produced a thoughtful, adult, in depth article about something which will be shallowly and somewhat immaturely glossed over in the mass market newsweeklies, sandwiched between articles on Lady Gaga and the Tea Party.