Not much, evidently, which is probably why idiots like Sarah Palin get traction in the first place. As much as I want to disbelieve this study, it explains a lot of our political discourse and thought these days:

If people are furnished with the facts, they will be clearer thinkers and better citizens. If they are ignorant, facts will enlighten them. If they are mistaken, facts will set them straight.

In the end, truth will out. Won’t it?

Maybe not. Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

In light of this finding, consider the following statements:

• The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.
• "I'm not saying [Obama] doesn't like white people, I'm saying he has a problem," Beck said. "This guy is, I believe, a racist."
• "You LIE!"

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The bobbleheads sure are doing their part in the Bush Magical Legacy Rehabilitation Tour. First we have the mysterious "Miss me yet?" billboard, then Tweety "Doesn't he look yummy in a flight suit?" Matthews asks if the nation will feel "nostalgia" for Bush with his memoir coming out, and every time you turn around there's a Bushie or a Cheney promoting the failed policies that saw Bush leave office with a record disapproval rating. Talk about a disconnect--or maybe it's just willful misinformation. There are no Americans wishing back for the days of the Bush presidency, for crissakes. We're still scarred from it, why would Americans want to open those wounds again?

Whichever way you want to categorize it, there is nothing more ludicrous and absent of facts than Kathleen Parker insisting that Bush has acted "nobly" since leaving office.

Is that right?

So is criticizing his successor not once, but twice--even after saying that the new Commander-in-Chief "deserved his silence", noble? Don't forget one was when he went to a foreign country--his speech in Calgary, Canada--and took thinly veiled swipes at Obama, saying that the two month old presidency harkened back to Hoover?

Is saying that Jimmy Carter "made his life miserable" noble?

Bush's post-presidency life has been fairly low-profile, especially in comparison to his ever-present and compulsively vocal vice president. He's made a few paid speeches, wrote his memoirs (which garnered him a comparatively small advance--perhaps a better indicator of how much Bush is expected to be missed by the American people) and worked on his fundraising for his library housed at SMU, whose primary purpose appears to be to rehab his legacy, much to the consternation of the staff there:

Their objections stem from the fear that the Bush center will act like a private think tank for neoconservative ideologues. “They get the cover of a university without having to play by its rules,” says Benjamin Johnson, an associate professor of history whose Bush Library Blog detailed the controversy at its height, between 2007 and 2008. The plans for the Bush institute sailed through S.M.U.’s administration, however, with the help of people like Ray Hunt, the oilman and longtime Bush supporter and friend, who is on the university’s board of trustees.

“We’re not going to have any of the usual controls over teaching and research hires and reviews,” complains Johnson. “My concerns have actually been heightened by the collapse of the Bush administration because it seems to me he and his circle are intent on rehabilitating him, and he is held in such disrepute by so many people across the country and the planet. I’m afraid this is going to be the main vehicle by which they try and rehabilitate their reputation.”

And by no measure, Kathleen Parker, can that be considered a noble effort.

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Seems that Sarah Palin isn't the only right-winger out there trying to convince the world that the "death panels" actually exist. Indeed, as Media Matters notes, there's a whole bandwidth of wingnuts out there trying to revive the notion.

One of these is the Troll Who Lives Under the Bridge And Sucks Your Toes, aka Dick Morris, who was on The O'Reilly Factor earlier this week with fill-in host Monica Crowley:

Morris: Look, Monica, it's one thing to load a big bill with pork. That's what the stimulus package was. But to load a health-care bill, where Americans are seriously worried that this is gonna destroy the health care their parents get, that this is gonna lead to government-imposed euthanasia, where they'll say, 'No, you can't have this annual mammogram, because I know it might save your life, but it costs too much.' 'No, you can't have this drug for colon cancer, because the drug we're going to let you take isn't as good as this one, but we can't afford it.' When we come to those kind of euthanasia-like decisions, to learn that the reason the Senate approved this was some little bitty payoff that went on to some insurance company that gave you a campaign contribution -- that kind of tawdry stuff for this kind of magnitude of deformity on the system is enough to drive people crazy -- me included.

I've always said that anyone who takes Dick Morris's advice deserves everything they get, because the man is such a font of misinformation. That includes a lot of intentional disinformation, promoting provably false "facts" that unhinge the people who absorb this crap. As we can see.

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Claire McCaskill of Missouri is just another Democratic deficit scold and she proudly said that she wouldn't vote for a health care bill that didn't totally reduce the deficit. With friends like these, conservatives need no enemies. She ratifies conservative beliefs. Thanks Claire.

The wonderful and all powerful OZ, the CBO, will guide her vote as if it came from GOD! And she was so proud to be in a bipartisan agreement with Mr. Wingnut himself, Judd Gregg, that she almost couldn't control herself.

Transcript:

Senator McCaskill, do you know enough about the Reid compromise to say whether you’ll support it?

MCCASKILL: Well, the whole reason we’re doing this bill is to bring down cost, first for the American people in health care, and secondly for the deficit. So until we get the numbers back from the Congressional Budget Office, we’re all on hold.

Until -- I have to be assured that this is going to bring down the deficit and it’s going to bring down health care costs for most Missouri families. WALLACE: And if it doesn’t?

MCCASKILL: Well, then we are going to have to go back to the drawing board. I’m optimistic we’re going to get a bill. There’s a lot of good stuff in this bill. There’s a lot of misinformation out there about this bill. So I’m optimistic we’re going to get a good piece of legislation passed.

But all of us are focused on those two very important ingredients, bringing down the deficit and bringing down health care costs for most American families.

WALLACE: Senator Gregg, do you know enough about the Reid compromise to be able to say whether or not you’ll support it?

GREGG: I don’t think anybody’s seen it. Basically, it’s being drafted in camera, behind closed doors, by Senator Reid and a few folks. We’ve seen the outlines of it, which are very, very suspicious relative to their effects on cost, which Claire has outlined is one of the primary concerns.

We just got an actuarial summary of the present bill, the present Reid bill, which was done by the president’s actuary, CMS. They said that the cost curve goes up under the Reid bill by $235 billion.

In addition, we know that if you let people buy into Medicare at age 55 instead of going on Medicare when they qualify for it in the 60s that you’re going to definitely get the people who are the sickest buying in, and therefore the cost of Medicare is clearly going to go up.

Now, Medicare is already a bankrupt program. It’s got $38 trillion of unfunded liability out there. And I think putting more people into Medicare is going to simply aggravate the bankruptcy of the program which is coming at us.

WALLACE: Senator McCaskill, those were two of the points I was going to raise with you. I mean, the Reid plan would expand Medicare, which is already in serious financial trouble, and no one knows how much this plan will cost.

Isn’t it crazy to talk about passing a plan that affects a sixth of the economy in the next couple of weeks?

MCCASKILL: No, it’s not. We’ve been working on this for months and months. There’s...

WALLACE: But not this part of it.

MCCASKILL: Well, there have been all kinds of things in this bill that the Republicans -- in fact, there’s a lot of Republican amendments in this bill that we’re debating right now.

And here’s the thing. We’ve got two different analysis of this bill, and the bill’s not complete yet. Both of them say that this bill is going to extend the life of Medicare. Both of these -- both CMS and CBO say we’re going to extend the life of Medicare.

And both of them say we’re going to reduce the deficit long term.

And both of them say for most Americans it’s going to stabilize the cost of health care over time and begin to bend that cost curve.

So we’ve got to stay focused on the positive things in this bill. You know, there’s a lot of politics around this thing. This is the time of year not only do the planes stack up in terms of legislation we’re considering, but it’s also the time of year that we drift away from policy and start playing bare-knuckled politics.

Even with cognitive dissonance this striking, they still think they've got a right to withhold civil rights from a whole segment of the population:

Maggie Gallagher's disdain for Marriage Equality New York board president Cathy Marino-Thomas was palpable. The feeling, we're guessing, was mutual. The two shared the stage at Hofstra University's “Day of Dialogue," and even outside the confines of a 30-second spot, Gallagher was still trafficking in misinformation. And eye rolls.

We do appreciate the debate over whether our "intolerance" for bigotry is, by definition, hate — of the very same variety we call out and despise daily on this website. That's Gallagher's position: By labeling Prop 8 supporters as advocates of hatred, we're being intolerant ourselves, showing no respect for a difference in viewpoints.

But what Maggie does not, and may never understand is the difference between agreeing to disagree, and actively endorsing discrimination against an entire group of people. For that, we cannot be tolerant. [..]

But here's the soundbite we're holding on to, as Maggie addresses Marino-Thomas: "[Your marriage] may be better, but it's not a marriage. … It's probably better than my marriage to hear you talk about it. I wouldn't talk about my marriage in such glowing terms."

It's so sad that someone who cannot speak well of their own marriage feels it's their right to fight to keep others from having that legal union.

On a related note, it's not a serious move so much as a political statement, but here in California, someone has decided to fight a real threat to the sanctity of marriage: the ability to divorce:

California Secretary of State Debra Bowen today authorized the backer of an initiative that would ban divorce to begin collecting signatures to put the proposed constitutional amendment before voters.

John Marcotte now has until March 22, 2010, to collect 694,354 signatures of registered voters in order to get the measure on the ballot next year. The proposal would change the California Constitution to "eliminate the ability of married couples to get divorced in California."[..]:

ELIMINATES THE LAW ALLOWING MARRIED COUPLES TO DIVORCE. INITIATIVE CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT. Changes the California Constitution to eliminate the ability of married couples to get divorced in California. Preserves the ability of married couples to seek an annulment. Summary of estimate by Legislative Analyst and Director of Finance of fiscal impact on state and local government: Savings to the state of up to hundreds of millions of dollars annually for support of the court system due to the elimination of divorce proceedings.

While I obviously don't want my rights taken away (not that I'm planning on divorcing my husband, mind you. He's stuck with me.), I do appreciate the sentiment behind it. My gay uncle's marriage does not harm my marriage, threatens no one else's relationship and it's a ludicrous argument to claim it does. However, the ease in which we may end marriages (one-third of all first marriages end within 10 years, according to the CDC) certainly does. If these wingnuts want to hold up marriage as the foundation of society, then put up or shut up.

CNN's media critic, Howard Kurtz, came up with THE answer to all our complaints:

KURTZ: And if liberals or conservatives like David Brooks don't like what the high-decibel pundits say or think they're peddling misinformation, they should go after them in the media marketplace, not with boycotts or name-calling or screaming or shouting, but on the battlefield of ideas.

Wow, that's so simple. Why didn't anybody think of that? Wait a second. Just hold on there. Isn't organizing a boycott an actual idea which then takes a ton of work to be successful? Isn't leading a boycott against a Glenn Beck or a Lou Dobbs actually going into the media marketplace and hitting them right in the pocketbook?

Can Howard suggest what battlefield of ideas I should go on? Does he consider Reliable Sources one of those battlefields? Can Howard help fund a radio program for me that will air either before or right after Sean Hannity, on all the same nationwide affiliates so I can at least partially compete with Hannidate's audience and have a chance to express my ideas at his level?

The Amazing Atheist: "Tell The Truth!" (h/t DU)

I've been in a funk this weekend. It's hard to look at the coverage of the 9/12 protests and not come to the conclusion that this country is seriously--and possibly irretrievably--messed up. I'm not even sure that half the country even knows what the truth is any more, or could recognize it if it was standing in front of them. I don't know if it's an unfortunate byproduct of the rough and tumble internet age, but the uninhibited rage scares me. And where is our media now? Trying to temper misinformation and out-and-out lies? Surely, you jest.

As per usual, the Sunday shows will give those out-of-touch-with-reality, anger-management-needing conservatives plenty of air time to confuse Americans. Rep. Joe "The Heckler" Wilson will get to lie some more on Fox News Sunday, Newt Gingrich (yes, again) will be on Meet the Press to spin away, Gang of Six Queen Olympia Snowe will be on Face the Nation and Tenther Gov. Tim Pawlenty will be on This Week. A single intellectually honest discussion of issues to be had? Surely, you jest.

ABC's "This Week" - Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius; Sens. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., and Mary Landrieu, D-La.; Gov. Tim Pawlenty, R-Minn.

CBS' "Face the Nation" - David Axelrod, White House senior adviser; Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine.

NBC's "Meet the Press" - Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and John Cornyn, R-Texas; Howard Dean, former national Democratic Party chairman; former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga.

NBC's "The Chris Matthews Show" - Panel: Helene Cooper, Howard Fineman, Joe Klein, Ceci Connolly. Topics: Has President Obama regained control in the health care debate? What is behind the venom President Obama has faced? Meter Questions: Was the anti-Obama venom unavoidable? YES: 6 NO: 6; Has Obama Got Command Back? YES: 12 No: 0.

CNN's "State of the Union" - White House press secretary Robert Gibbs; Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H.; Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va.

CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS" - This week - an in-depth look at Afghanistan. The election, the war, the country as a whole. All riddled with problems. What can the U.S. and the world do? We'll speak with two of the Afghan presidential candidates, with Michael Ware who spent a week in the heartland of the insurgency, and with a panel of experts debating the options.

"Fox News Sunday" - Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C.; Sens. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.; Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union.

Viewer note: Barack Obama will make his third appearance on 60 Minutes tonight, talking health care. But until then, what's catching your eye this morning?

Reasic: Debunking health care misinformation

Shakesville: Crazy, angry, and without a trace of irony.

A Tiny Revolution: To pay or not to pay.

Scholars and Rogues: Why the American media has such a signal-to-noise problem.

BAGnewsNotes: Michelle Malkin with the sound off.

Good Math, Bad Math: "I am the antichrist. No, really!"

Guest post by Batocchio. Temporarily e-mail tips to batocchio9 AT yahoo DOT

ABC's John Stossel is a buffoon of the highest order...and I believe that's being generous. Stossel has long shilled for right wing and corporate interests, and right on cue, he jumps head first into the health care debate and he's not pulling any punches -- Insurance company profits are more important than sick Americans:

"Insurers agreed to abandon some of their most controversial practices, like denying coverage to applicants with pre-existing medical conditions."

That's from the first paragraph of today's New York Times "news" story on health insurance.

Do the Times writers and editors take pride in their economic cluelessness? They take it as fact that denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions is "controversial," and that abandoning the practice shows "good will."

In the entire debate over health care reform, I have seen no greater example of why we need a public insurance option (actually, we need a universal plan) than Stossel's blog post.

Doing that may be required by Congress and cheered by the New York Times, but that doesn't make it a good thing for America. It doesn't even make it insurance. It's welfare. We can debate whether such welfare is good policy, but let's discuss it honestly. Calling welfare "insurance" muddies thinking. Read on...

The only mud here lies between Stossel's ears. If someone with a pre-existing condition is paying for their insurance policy, it's not welfare, unless you're a corporate shill who only cares about company profits and not people. Health insurance companies need to be returned to non-profit status, for the good of the country.

We recently posted the vile, anti-gay rant from Oklahoma Republican, Sally Kern, and since that time, Pam's House Blend has been covering Kern's feckless and defiant responses, the aftermath and the growing outrage. Apparently, Ellen Degeneres caught wind of Kern's nasty little tirade and decided to not only play clips of it on her show, she even gave the raging homophobic lawmaker a ring. PageOneQ has the video:

"I feel like there's some misinformation going on here," Ellen said after playing clips of the speech, "and--I think I need to call her."

The automated voice mail system indicated that Kern's inbox was full.

"I bet!" Ellen responds out loud, before opting instead to leave a message for the legislator via television broadcast.

"Hi! It's Ellen DeGeneres," she opens. "The gay one." Read on...

Major thanks to Pam Spaulding for staying on top of this story!