1. Rep. Paul Ryan and his athletic exploits
As this article at The Atlantic explains,Paul Ryan's decision to exaggerate his marathon running record is bizarre on at least one level:

We've all exaggerated to make ourselves look better. You've probably done it. I know I have. (Let's not think about the whole category of "what happens on first dates.") But out of prudent self-protection, most people have a sense of "situational awareness" when it comes to self-burnishment. Somebody you're talking to in a bar, and you're never likely to see again, is in one category. Somebody interviewing you for national broadcast is in another. That is what I'm having a hard time fully understanding.
You're on a nationwide show. You're one of the handful of people most prominently in the national eye. You know that everything you say is going to be recorded, parsed, and examined. And still -- last week, not at a freshman mixer or in a Jaycees speech somewhere -- you happily reel off a claim that is impressive enough to get people's interest and admiration, and specific enough to be easily testable.

The killer is "specific enough to be easily testable". Unlike, say, discussions about policy, where there is some level of subjectivity and opinion at work, athletic performances are measured by one of those objective measures known as time. As the comments from recreational runners show in this article by Paul Krugman, lying about your marathon times is beyond inconceivable. All marathon runners know exactly what times they turned in on ALL of their races. The committment and effort involved in preparing for a marathon is so high that you remember that stuff for the rest of your life.
So where does it leave us? Frankly, after a number of his utterances in his RNC speech were exposed as a long way from the truth, for me, this is further confirmation that Paul Ryan, far from being a "breath of fresh air", is merely another politician for whom the truth is sometimes so inconvenient that it needs to be avoided.

2. The Full list of Presidential Election candidates
Just a reminder of the overall process for the election, and also that there are a number of other candidates besides the two rather obvious ones.

3. Lawmaker's remorse on making prostitution illegal in Texas
After 11 years, the truth has begun to dawn that perhaps trying to vanish the World's Oldest Profession is doomed to failure..better late than never I guess, but the big question is whether electorates will agree that this sort of legislation is futile.

4. The difference between a cynic and a skeptic
As a skeptic, I have often had to fend off accusations in the past that I am actually a cynic. This article does a good job of explaining the difference between a skeptic and a cynic.

5. Watching America
This site looks interesting...one of the challenges I face when discussing the image of America with Americans is that many of them have never left the USA, and they do not watch any television programming that might provide them with insight on how the USA is viewed outside its borders.

In the first part of this extract from "Whose Line Is It Anyway?", Paul Merton acts as Josey Lawrence's translator from, er, Swedish...his second line is the jaw-dropper, we all fell off our chairs in the UK laughing when this came into the living room...

One of the things i slowly did over the last 12-13 years since I moved to the USA has been to mostly ignore mass media outlets, beyond immediate high-level news of world events. I have been seeking out commentary from all points of the spectrum on small media (often local media) sites and blogs and blog aggregators.
One of the major reasons that I stay away from mass media outlets is the inability of those outlets to perform even basic fact-checking. If one political party announced that the sun rises in the West tomorrow, a lot of media outlets would simply read the announcement, find an opposing party who would declare that, No, the sun does rise in the East, and then assemble a report along the lines of "Party A claims that Sun rises in West, Party B diagrees". They would effectively abdicate any responsibility for calling the claim that the Sun rises in the West for what it is - total BS.
Jay Rosen coined a very succinct term for this approach some time ago - The View From Nowhere. He has returned to the topic persistently, as the examples of this practice have piled up over the last 10 years.
This issue has come to the fore in the past few days because of events in the 2012 electoral cycle, where parties have been making claims about their opponents that at best are misleading, and at worst, utterly false. However, the reaction of the parties making the claims, when challenged on their falseness, has been to double down and try to claim that disagreement with false claims is merely a matter of opinion. This does ignore the memorable quote on this subject by Daniel Patrick Moynihan:

Everybody is entitled to their own opinions, but not to their own set of facts

I wrote about this phenomenon and how the media should be responding to it over at Jay's blog today.

In the 1980's, I bought and read a book called "The Coming Plague" that predicted that at some point in the not too distant future, there would be one or more pandemics.
Right now, we are dangerously close to the re-appearance of pandemics, for rather different reasons postulated in that book, which mainly dealt with the possibility of the appearance of immune viruses or strains of bacteria (but, in case we forget, MRSA is already with us, occasionally attacking humans in a dramatic, dangerous and often debilitating and disfiguring way).
The anti-vaccine movement is now eroding herd immunity, as significant numbers of children are being pulled from vaccination programs by worried and scared parents.
This article attempts to analyze the roots and causes of that anti-vaccine panic. Personally, I do not think that the anti-vaccine movement will die away until there is a significant pandemic that kills enough people to warrant governmental intervention, probably in the form of laws passed to prevent children from being withdrawn from vaccination programs. That would be an unfortunate erosion of personal and parental rights, but it may be shown to be necessary for the health of an integrated modern society.

One of the great comic inventions of Paul Merton, where he plays a policeman reporting incidents that occurred while he was on an acid trip. Note Paul's impeccable use of classic British Police Language.

I grew up listening to radio comedy in the 1960's. At the time, Tony Hancock was THE biggest name in comedy in the UK, and would remain so, until his personality defects and addiction to alcohol gradually overwhelmed him and destroyed his career. In many ways, Hancock was an exemplar of the "comedian as sad person" archetype.
Hancock's radio scripts utilized shrewd observation of British life. The episode where the Americans move into a local airbase, inspiring Hancock to rent out his shed as a "luxury apartment" to them, is classic with more than a hint of truth to it. Along with the satirical observation, the writers also worked on the creation of Hancock's comic character, that of a blustering blaggart, cocksure until confronted with his own failings. They also skilfully utilized the straight man-comic man dichotomy, a role filled by Syd James up until the point that Hancock, worried that James was getting too many laughs, insisted that he be removed from the show. This was the beginning of Hancock's decline, as his insecurities overwhelmed him, drove him into a spiral of alcohol abuse, and essentially ended both his career and his life.
However, until he self-destructed, Hancock was a brilliant comic actor. Here is his famous episode, The Blood Donor, where, in typical Hancock style, he blusters his way into a hospital to do his public service, only to fall victim to his own terror of medical procedures and needles.Also note the brief reference to my home town in the first scene...

In Toronto and New Jersey, people can watch the impact of elected bullies on governance.
Toronto has Mayor Rob Ford, a bellicose, aggressive, hectoring bully. When Richard Florida, a resident of Toronto, consistently highlights Ford's appalling ineptitude at managing public policy in your city, you should realize that the leader is becoming the story, not the policy.
New Jersey has Chris Christie, who, as this story makes clear, seems to have a tendency that he cannot control to get involved in negative, street-brawling encounters with people. At the same time, Christie seems to want sympathy for the reality that he is morbidly obsese. He appears to be so utterly self-absorbed that he cannot see the ginormous paradox of his whole attitude.
As a studier of bullying pathologies, due to my becoming a target for them in my youth, it is pretty clear to me that both Mayor Ford and Governor Christie are weapons-grade bullies. Their actions are contrary to the standards that elected officials should be living up to. Whether their electorates will draw the correct conclusions I do not know. I am not optimistic. In recessions, electors tend to be drawn to candidates who project themselves as "tough", "no-nonsense" etc. Those attributes are prized more highly in a crisis than the attributes of being a decent respectful human being.

As a follow-up to the bizarrely non-scientific nonsense being spouted by Rep. Todd Akin in the Missouri Senate race, this article examines the credentials (or lack thereof) of other GOP representatives in positions of power and influence on governmental committees.
The article hits the nail right on the head at the beginning:

On matters of basic science and peer-reviewed knowledge, from evolution to climate change to elementary fiscal math, many Republicans in power cling to a level of ignorance that would get their ears boxed even in a medieval classroom. Congress incubates and insulates these knuckle-draggers.

Of course, any time you attempt to point out the sheer intellectual vapidity of one party, the apologists for the other side climb into the comments thread with moronic variations on "but the other side does it too!". Straight off the bat, commenter Concerned Citizen (now there's a pseudonym culled from the sunday newspaper letter-writer name lexicon) tries a classical rhethorical line:

They worship a different god than the conservatives here -- the god of "lefty liberalism". They believe this gives them the right to impose their ideas unilaterally on everyone else.

Eegads. If you're going to try an argument, you might want to try something that is less threadbare....sheesh.

Rep. Todd Akin has certainly worked out how to get himself into the news, via his unbelievably asinine, stupid and uneducated utterance on rape.
However, as has been pointed out already, it is not as if Rep. Akin suddenly left the reservation with his most recent comments. He has been making these sorts of incendiary and/or moonbattish statements for many years. So far this election cycle, he has been busily churning out all sorts of odd and bizarre verbiage.
He is also expressing a view that has been in wide circulation for a long time. This is an important point to be stressed - Todd Akin is not an outlier in the ranks of authoritarian nitwits. The view he was expressing is one that is held by a large number of people in the modern USA. This should worry a lot of people; my fear is that it will not worry anywhere enough people for an epiphany to occur that holds a magnifying glass up to the underlying value systems that perpetuate this sort of nonsensical, anti-scientific, borderline sociopathic viewpoint.
The context of Akin's absurd and demeaning comments lies in the abortion debate, one of the great fault lines that crosses American life. This comment at Popehat, for me, encapsulated a lot of the underlying truth that generally gets swept out of the way as large numbers of people of loud conviction and limited reasoning ability shout past each other.
UPDATE - Jim Wright over at Stonkettle Station, as part of his evisceration of the Akin Follies, also asks the more pertinent question of why no media figure has put Akin in the spotlight and asked him for some facts to back up his ludicrous assertions. The posting reminds me again of why I think that most of the media outlets in the modern USA are about as much use as a chocolate teapot.
UPDATE 2 - Here is a biting satire of many of the authoritarian nitwit attitudes to women and sex...

If you're going to try and justify trying to restrict voting by the population by limiting early voting hours in Democratic counties, you might want to NOT mention your target group by name in your justification. It, you know, gives the game away.
Here is an earlier posting on the same scumbag behavior.
The comments on this most recent posting are well worth reading for their succinct wit.