Department of Analytical Tools

Salon.com has a piece up urging Democrats to dump Obama and go with a candidate who will restore their party to its New Deal era politics. According to the column by Matt Stoller, there are a number of reasons why they should, including: Read below the fold...

Last week, I talked about the politics of resentment, and some of the commenters criticized what I wrote on the grounds that I was telling people what is better for them. This is not true.

It's not about false consciousness it's about confronting people and finding out what they really believe. Read below the fold...

Last week I talked about the psychology of resentment, and how that is tied up with notions of self reliance. This week, I'm going to talk about some myths of self-reliance, and how we can talk to people who embrace said myths. Read below the fold...

Lately I've been thinking about the politics of resentment.

I was talking with a friend of mine about why people of modest means continue to shill for policies which make their lives worse. I theorize that it comes mostly from the desire to avoid a self-hating narrative. Read below the fold...

Sometimes its handy to copy a website before it gets changed -

For example a group like Third Way might decide that something they posted is a bit embarrassing and want to make a few quick changes to limit future damage. Sadly if you haven't preserved a copy for future reference you are out of luck.

Any Penguinista knows this is an easy chore on the command line with "wget". Now wget will not make a copy of the website that perfectly matches the original's layout however it will drag down every document on that website and store it on your local system for safe keeping.

For those experienced with working on the command line the command is simple:

wget -mk http://www.thirdway.org/

Read below the fold...

Cross-posted from Real Economics. Read below the fold...

So, recently I offended a bunch of nice people because I basically said: "men are easier to please than women, sexually speaking." I didn't mean this to be about men being more stupid, less exciting or interesting, or any other negative connotation about men and sex. But gosh! Is that so controversial to say? Men need... well, imho it's pretty simple. Sure, men want and need love and relationships and complexity and all that. But men also want simple things, and if one is good at those, one can make any man come. Read below the fold...

The economy is going great guns for the richest 2% or so, but for the other 98% of us it's still crappy. How did we get into this mess? How do we get out of it?

The answers are simple, because we've already done this experiment before, and not all that long ago, either. We call the two parts of that earlier experiment "The Great Depression" and "The New Deal". Read below the fold...

From Rolling Stone magazine, the latest in a rash of negative articles about Faux News:
How Roger Ailes Built the Fox News Fear Factory

The onetime Nixon operative has created the most profitable propaganda machine in history. Inside America's Unfair and Imbalanced Network

Fascinating look at Ailes career. One thing you learn is that political astroturf predates the Internet. Read below the fold...

After the killing of Bin Laden, there have been a lot of questions about how much the Pakistani government knew about the situation. One thing to keep in mind is that Pakistan's political environment is riven with factions, each with its own agenda and armed supporters. Read below the fold...