Draining reservoir after urination incident shows tenuous grasp of science; Portland throws out 38 million gallons of water after someone peed in it. The world has been taken over by chuckleheads.

and a little hate, for good measure:

Songwriter Diane Warren Wishes Tiger Were Smiling over Ted Cruz's Dead Body

as several apply .... hate from the left?  kinda.  but there's something more insidious at work here.MSNBC's Harris-Perry Mocks People Who Lost Insurance: Suggests Dems Say 'Just Deal With That'

in other news:  I'll start treating it like an emergency when the people telling me it's an emergencystart behaving like it's an emergency: Years of Living Hypocritically: Five Alarmist Celebs and Their Double Standards

and because of Carson's Rule of Three: New Documents Show IRS, DOJ Collusion on Potential Prosecution of Tax Exempt Groups

from The Volokh Conspiracy

Ezra Klein helped inaugurate Vox, his new explanatory journalism venture, with a think piece  titled “How Politics Makes Us Stupid.” The essay, largely drawing upon the research of  Yale’s Dan Kahan and the Cultural Cognition Project, discussed how ideologically motivated reasoning affects the way individuals process information, provoked a substantial number of responses, including these from David Harsanyi and Will Wilkinson.  Among others, I was quite astounded by the claim that “the belief that many of our most bitter political battles are mere misunderstandings” is an idea that “courses through the Constitution,” but that’s a topic for another day.

Among those responding to Klein’s essay was Paul Krugman, who found it to present “a genuine intellectual puzzle.”  He wrote:

What Ezra does is cite research showing that people understand the world in ways that suit their tribal identities: in controlled experiments both conservatives and liberals systematically misread facts in a way that confirms their biases. And more information doesn’t help: people screen out or discount facts that don’t fit their worldview. Politics, as he says, makes us stupid.

But here’s the thing: the lived experience is that this effect is not, in fact, symmetric between liberals and conservatives. Yes, liberals are sometimes subject to bouts of wishful thinking. But can anyone point to a liberal equivalent of conservative denial of climate change, or the “unskewing” mania late in the 2012 campaign, or the frantic efforts to deny that Obamacare is in fact covering a lot of previously uninsured Americans? I don’t mean liberals taking positions you personally disagree with — I mean examples of overwhelming rejection of something that shouldn’t even be in dispute.

This gave Kahan quite a chuckle.  After “laughing [himself] into a state of hyperventilation,” Kahan penned a more serious response, pointing out how Krugman’s essay was itself evidence of how “ ideologically motivated reasoning is in fact perfectly symmetric with respect to right-left ideology.”  Explains Kahan:

The test for motivated cognition is not whether someone gets the “right” answer but how someone assesses evidence.

A person displays ideologically motivated cognition when, instead of weighing evidence based on criteria related to its connection to the truth, he or she credits or dismisses it based on its conformity to his or her ideological predispositions.

Thus, if we want to use public opinion on some issue — say, climate change — to assess the symmetry of ideologically motivated reasoning, we can’t just say, “hey, liberals are right, so they must be better reasoners.”

Rather we must determine whether “liberals” who “believe” in climate change differ from “conservatives” who “don’t believe” in how impartially they weigh evidence supprotive of & contrary to their respective positions. . . .

Kahan then goes on to explain how this hypothesis has been tested (in papers like this one), and how it shows that — contrary to Krugman’s “lived experience” — both right and left fall prey to motivated cognition.  Kahan continues:

That Krugman is too thick to see that one can’t infer anything about the quality of partisans’ reasoning from the truth or falsity of their beliefs is … another element of Krugman’s proof that ideological reasoning is symmetric across right and left!

For in fact, that “the other side” is closed-minded is one of the positions that partisans are unreasoningly committed to.

This headline crawled into my inbox: Dueling climate reports – this one is worth sharing on your own blog

So I am.

U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT: The so-called “smoking gun” proving the Internal Revenue Service played politics with conservative groups seeking official non-profit, social welfare status over the last several years may finally have been found.

Emails obtained by Judicial Watch through the Freedom of Information Act reveal Lois Lerner cooking up plans with Justice Department officials to talk about ways to criminally charge conservative groups that are insufficiently quiet.

Larry Noble, a law professor now with the Soros-funded Campaign Legal Center, was cited in the emails as someone agitating to jail conservatives who “falsely” report on IRS forms that they are not engaged in political speech. Lerner talked about setting up meetings with Justice Department election lawyers who wanted to talk about making Noble’s dreams a reality — this after Senator Sheldon Whitehouse raised the idea of criminal charges for conservatives who are not sufficiently quiet, charges that they falsely completed an IRS tax exemption form.

in other news GAO report: White House directly involved in Enroll America fundraising. “Until now, outgoing Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius was the only official known to have solicited financial support for Enroll America, a nonprofit that promoted enrollment for the Affordable Care Act. But a Government Accountability Office report released Monday detailed not only the secretary’s involvement but that of a White House adviser.”

Sounds like someone was trying to cover it up, too.

THE ONION DISTILLS THE OBAMA ERA AS ONLY IT CAN: FBI Uncovers Al-Qaeda Plot To Just Sit Back And Enjoy Collapse Of United States.

Putting the nation on alert against what it has described as a “highly credible terrorist threat,” the FBI announced today that it has uncovered a plot by members of al-Qaeda to sit back and enjoy themselves while the United States collapses of its own accord.

Obama talks about pay gap, but then punishes working mothers. “New rules issued by Obama’s Treasury Department force many department employees with kids to burn a vacation day or take unpaid leave whenever snow shuts down the district. For a childless worker, on the other hand, a snow day means a free day off. The rules behind this cruel dynamic make some sense, but not if you care about helping women achieve pay equity.” Mitch McConnell and Kelly Ayotte want to fix, but Obama is talking veto.

No Joke: After Ginning Up 'War on Women' Rhetoric, OFA Uses Ted Kennedy to Tout Obamacare

oh, and that "war on inequality?"

 Paul Krugman’s Compensation Package: Liiiiiitle Bit Awkward

JAMES TARANTO: Poor Little Rich Man: How to become a millionaire by lamenting income inequality.

who said "I don't care who votes ... it's who COUNTS the votes that matters"?

It ain't the votes, but it IS counting.

Census Bureau: Change that Conceals Obamacare Impact Before Midterms 'Coincidental'

Reminder: Obama moved Census control to the White House early in his first term.

Is Obama Cooking the Census Books for Obamacare?

For several months now, whenever the topic of enrollment in the Affordable Care Act came up, I’ve been saying that it was too soon to tell its ultimate effects. We don’t know how many people have paid for their new insurance policies, or how many of those who bought policies were previously uninsured. For that, I said, we will have to wait for Census Bureau data, which offer the best assessment of the insurance status of the whole population. Other surveys are available, but the samples are smaller, so they’re not as good; the census is the gold standard. Unfortunately, as I invariably noted, these data won’t be available until 2015.

I stand corrected: These data won’t be available at all. Ever.

No, I’m not kidding. I wish I was. The New York Times reports that the Barack Obama administration has changed the survey so that we cannot directly compare the numbers on the uninsured over time.

If the numbers were good, we’d know about it.

JAMES TARANTO: Judd Gregg’s Warning About Obama’s Politicization Of Census Bureau Was Prescient.

Gregg served out his Senate term retiring after the 2010 election, when another Republican, Kelly Ayotte, was elected as his successor. The Democrats eventually got their 60th senator: In April, Pennsylvania’s Arlen Specter switched parties, and in July, Minnesota’s Al Franken was seated after a prolonged recount. The Democratic supermajority lasted only seven months, until Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown was seated after winning a special election occasioned by Ted Kennedy’s death. That was long enough to push ObamaCare through over united Republican opposition.

Now ObamaCare is providing evidence that Gregg was right to worry about politicization of the census. . . .