It's the Obamacare website deadline.

What's up?

"November 30th does not represent a relaunch of HealthCare.gov," said Julie Bataille, a spokeswoman for the government's Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which operates the site. "It is not a magical date. There will be times after November 30th when the site, like any website, does not perform optimally."

Oh, right. It was a deadline, but it wasn't a deadline deadline. You must have misunderstood, but the Obama administration would like to thank you for accepting the 2-month quieting they procured by making you somehow feel there was a deadline. It's quite similar to the way they quelled opposition with the promise that if you like your insurance, you can keep your insurance. You are to be praised for your respectful submission to the management of expectations.

In these the last days of Obama as a religion, the WaPo writes of the "dwindling faith in his competence and in many of the personal attributes that have buoyed him in the past."

Oh, the language of the once-true believers is so careful! And yet you can still see that it was a religion, kind of a religion. There was faith, but it's dwindling. It was faith in his competence and in many of the personal attributes. And our faith buoyed him. We kept him aloft in the heavens and — this is a report on a poll — in the polls.

On three measures of leadership and empathy that have been tested repeatedly in Post-ABC polls, Obama now is underwater on all three for the first time. Half or more now say he is not a strong leader, does not understand the problems of “people like you,” and is not honest and trustworthy. Perceptions of the president as a strong leader have dropped 15 points since January, and over the past year the percentage of registered voters who say he is not honest and trustworthy has increased 12 points....

Also interesting, but not specifically about Obama:

Forty-three percent say the Republican Party is too conservative, compared with 36 percent who say its views are just right. For Democrats, 46 percent say the party’s views are too liberal and 41 percent say they are about right.

So more people think the Democrats are too liberal than think the Republicans are too conservative. But the "about right" percent is 5 points higher for Democrats than for Republicans. Unless more people have no opinion of Republicans than of Democrats, that must mean more people think Republicans are too liberal than think Democrats are too conservative.

Ratings for the tea party movement are quite similar to those of the Republican Party. But in the aftermath of the partial federal government shutdown, a majority say they oppose the movement for the second time in two months. And more than four in 10 say the movement has too much influence on the GOP, while only 25 percent say its influence is about right.

Does that mean that about 35% would like the Tea Party to have more influence — and 60% say the Tea Party should have as much or more influence than it has now? Considering that Democrats were being polled here too, that sounds like an amazing amount of support for the Tea Party.

ADDED: I'm addressing the form of expression in the article, but I realize that I can click through to the details. 17% think Republicans are too liberal and 10% think Democrats are too conservative.And 21% think the Tea Party has too little influence in the Republican Party. 11% have no opinion. So 46% think the Tea Party has either the right amount of influence or should have more. Only 43% think it has too much.

AND: Here's the detailed view on the Tea Party question. Among Republicans, 40% say "about the right amount" and 26% say "too little," for a total of 66% percent positive. 26% say too much. Among Democrats, 59% say too much. Interestingly, among the 18 to 39 year-old group, 47% say right amount or too little, and 39% say too much. It's the oldest group — 65 and older — that is most antagonistic to the Tea Party. 50% say too much, and the combined too little and right amount group is 39%.

BUT: Here's the detailed view on the question of whether people support or oppose the Tea Party, and there you see clear opposition in the 18 to 39 year-old group.

How are all these JFK retrospectives affecting Obama?

Much as I think there's way too much talk about how whatever happens affects Obama, I'd like to talk about this.

We've seen it coming for years, the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. There was plenty of time for media to prepare material — books, movies, TV shows, articles — going back over the historical event that's already been examined over and over. This onslaught of material was perfectly predictable, and those with present-day political interests surely thought hard about how to harness the energy and feeling that would swell up in November 2013.

But they did not know in advance how nasty the political arena was going to look. Those who were hoping to burnish the image of the Democratic Party did not know what trouble would be surrounding their current President. They must have thought all the respectful backward gazing at Jack would stir up more love for Barack (the other -ack). And now they must be — ack! — choking on the noisome melée of goo for Jack and boo for Barack.

So I wonder how Barack Obama feels about all this 50th anniversary business. Perhaps he's relieved that there's a distraction, but maybe he's irked that Kennedy is getting all the love and sentimental celebration right when there's suddenly — unexpectedly! — a rage for exposing the explosion of chaos under Obama.

Despite his public support for gay rights, Alec Baldwin is punished for uttering an anti-gay slur.

And he even apologized. ("I did not intend to hurt or offend anyone... Words are important. I understand that, and will choose mine with great care going forward.... Behavior like this undermines hard-fought rights that I vigorously support.")

Is that fair?


Baldwin — like many celebrities and assorted other humans — wants esteem from those whose esteem he's decided he values, those in the entertainment industry and among the American cultural elite, and these days, it's easy to see that this means that he ought to support gay rights. But that doesn't tell us how he really feels at a gut level. What pops out when he's angry and looking to express hatred shows us what he hides when he's doing his mundane PR.

Who knows how much hatred against gay people there really is out there and to what extent it's apportioned among people who support gay rights on the one hand and people who oppose gay rights on the other? I don't find it hard to imagine someone who hates a particular type of person nevertheless believing that those people deserve equal rights — because it makes sense philosophically or it fits a political ideology. I also don't find it hard to understand someone feeling no hostility for gay people and still rejecting same-sex marriage and thinking that all non-procreative sexual behavior should be discouraged.

Eagerness to support gay rights may stem from a desire to compensate for strongly felt aversion to gay people. Baldwin's problem is that this compensation cannot stand up to his intense emotionality, and paparazzi who know this have made a game out of provoking him to the point of explosion. It's actually kind of sad. He's a great actor, and since he tends to play villains — wonderfully — he doesn't even need us to think that he's a good person.

But should he have a political talk show on MSNBC? That's for MSNBC to decide, and obviously they have. MSNBC has chosen to be more genteel and respectful toward the cultural elite. It doesn't seem to know how to foster vibrant discourse about politics, and the gambit of putting on the over-passionate Baldwin was always lame, even before he embarrassed them.

"Obamacare... will not be politically viable if it hurts more people than it helps, and probably not even if it helps a few more than it hurts."

"If that turns out to be the case, there will be hell to pay politically for the president and his fellow Democrats, likely for a very long time," writes Byron York, in a column titled "The simple question that will determine Obamacare's fate."

Is this right?

1. Don't conflate the continuation of the Obamacare program with the future political prospects of Democrats. We might very well be stuck in the Obamacare system whether people end up liking it or not. Punishing Democrats politically is something that can happen quite aside from whether Obamacare ever ends.

2. Many people opposed Obamacare in principle. We start with a base of about half the people who don't like it and might not even like it if they are substantially benefited. To this base, add the people who believed it would be good and are disappointed.

3. Many of us — whether we've been for or against Obamacare in the past — may believe that the promise was that we'd all be better off. It wasn't sold as: You have a good shot at being a winner. Or: there will be winners and losers, but overall, it's the greater good for the greater number. If this is what people believe they were told, it's not enough that 51% are better off and 49% are worse off or even that 60% are better off and 40% are worse off. Even 80/20 doesn't seem right. It was supposed to make the whole system better for everyone.

4. Mere marginal improvement overall even augmented by the luck of getting a personal benefit does not resonate with the feelings of altruism and idealism that have buoyed supporters of Obama and Obamacare over the years.

"I got cut off, yelled at, screamed on. The moderator tried gently to intervene, to ask the brother to let me speak, to wait his turn."

"To model allyship. To listen. But to no avail. The brother kept on screaming about his commitment to women, about all he had 'done for us,' about how I wasn’t going to erase his contributions. Then he raised his over 6 foot tall, large brown body out of the chair, and deliberately slung a cup of water across my lap, leaving it to splash in my face, on the table, on my clothes, and on the gadgets I brought with me."

Wrote Rutgers professor Brittney Cooper, describing her experience on a panel at the Brecht Forum on the topic of "ally, privilege, and comrade," quoted by Mychal Denzel Smith in a column at The Nation titled "There Is Still Misogyny in Progressive Movements."

I don't know who the water-slinger was, and I don't mean to excuse aqua-violence, but I can't tell from Cooper's description that the man's anger arose from his misogyny. It sounds more like anger at being called a misogynist.

I've never believed the notion that left-wing politics and feminism overlap all that much, and anyone who thinks they do should brush up on the history. There's plenty of shallow feminism amongst lefties who know they're supposed to toe the line, and it's not surprising that they're dismayed to hear that they haven't done enough. Progressivism is about doing things, and there's always more to be done, so how could you possibly have done enough?

"I am as frustrated and angry as anyone," claims Kathleen Sebelius, apologizing... stalling for time...

"You deserve better. I apologize. I am accountable to you for fixing these problems, and I’m committed to earning your confidence back by fixing the site.”

In the Washington Post account, it says: "She pledged that the glitches are 'fixable.'"

Did she say "glitches"? I'd like to know, because I think they need to move on to a new word. "Glitches" is so 3 weeks ago. It was intended, back then, in the early days of HealthCare.gov, to calm us... to palliate... and it just doesn't work that way any more.

Also old and increasingly intolerable: politicians claiming to be as or more emotional that the people they are hurting.

At least Sebelius toned it down a step from Obama's "no one is madder than me." It's possible to step it up and present oneself as the angriest person. Even Obama did not go there. He merely said no one is madder. So maybe some people are equally mad. Sebelius's rhetoric seems milder, but in fact, it too is a claim of matching the level of anger of the most angry person.

I know it's the old empathy routine, but I have no empathy for them and their empathy routine. For one thing, these people are actually pretty calm, and given the amount of time they had leading up to the opening of the website, it's not believable that they approached their task with great energy and passion. It seems to me that the timeline was set for political reasons, to skirt the 2012 elections and to make good-seeming things hit at the point when it would help most for the 2014 elections.

For another thing, would you really want the angriest person in the world working on your incredibly complicated technical problems? I know most people don't experience the images in language as concretely as I do, but in my mind, when the President of the United States says there is no one madder than he is, I picture a total lunatic in the White House.



Okay, now, you can pull Kathleen's head out of the teapot. She's joined the fellowship of politicos who assure us they're at the top level of madness.

Hey! Teapot. Nice image:

"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked....

Alice had not gone much farther before she came in sight of the house...

The White House....

... it was so large a house that she did not like to go near till she had nibbled some more of the left-hand bit of mushroom.

Yeah, we're calling that "the blue pill." Obama said you're going to need it.

There was a table set out under a tree in front of the house, and the March Hare and the Hatter were having tea at it; a Dormouse was sitting between them, fast asleep....

"Take some more tea," the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.

"I've had nothing yet," Alice replied in an offended tone, "so I can't take more."

"You mean you can't take less," said the Hatter; "it's very easy to take more than nothing."...

"At any rate, I'll never go there again!" said Alice, as she picked her way through the wood. "It's the stupidest tea-party I ever was at in all my life!"

So... find a better tea party.

Embarrassingly lame joke Jennifer Granholm had ready for her "Meet the Press" effort to buck up support for Obamacare.

"First of all, the President is so mad about about this that he himself with go down and supervise the writing of code if this is not fixed by the end of November."



That's not just lame, actually. It's enraging. Who cares how mad Obama is? It's not like his overflowing emotions are fixing anything. Is his anger supposed to work as a painkiller when what we want is a cure? I think of this:



Quite beyond the irritating palliative medicine of Obama's choler, there's the flaunting of rank incompetence. Obama supervising the writing of code?! He knows nothing about writing code. The notion that he'd select himself as the supervisor of an activity about which he lacks any expertise only heightens our suspicion that he's been selecting the wrong people all along.

"I had some dim intuitive feeling that what was wrong with all journalism is that the reporter tended to be objective and that that was one of the great lies of all time."

Said Norman Mailer, quoted in this subscribers-only article by Louis Menand in The New Yorker. As Menand puts it, Mailer "made the way in which events are reported part of what is reported."

ADDED: You could say something similar about law: I had some dim intuitive feeling that what was wrong with all judicial opinions is that the judge tended to be objective and that that was one of the great lies of all time. But what then? No judge can switch to writing the judicial equivalent of New Journalism.

(20 years ago, I tried to write about this problem, here (PDF) — with some quotes from Mailer's "Executioner's Song.")

AND: From that link, above, on New Journalism, which goes to Wikipedia:

How and when the term New Journalism began to refer to a genre is not clear....

But wherever and whenever the term arose, there is evidence of some literary experimentation in the early 1960s, as when Norman Mailer broke away from fiction to write Superman Comes to the Supermarket. A report of John F. Kennedy's nomination that year, the piece established a precedent which Mailer would later build on in his 1968 convention coverage (Miami and the Siege of Chicago) and in other nonfiction as well.

And here, you can read the full text of "Superman Comes to the Supermarket" (at the Esquire website, Esquire having once been a monumentally important magazine). It begins:

For once let us try to think about a political convention without losing ourselves in housing projects of fact and issue. Politics has its virtues, all too many of them -- it would not rank with baseball as a topic of conversation if it did not satisfy a great many things -- but one can suspect that its secret appeal is close to nicotine. Smoking cigarettes insulates one from one’s life, one does not feel as much, often happily so, and politics quarantines one from history; most of the people who nourish themselves in the political life are in the game not to make history but to be diverted from the history which is being made.

Convenient sidebar chez Esquire: 



Are we doomed? Did you go to my link and read the sentences that followed those 3 mindbendingly interesting sentences that began "Superman Comes to the Supermarket," or did you go over to click through to the explanation of why Miss Johansson in the sexiest woman alive (or what a "brutally frank" 98-year-old woman might say about sex)?

"Even When the GOP Loses, It Wins/Think the Senate deal is a resounding defeat for Republicans? Think again."

 That is the headline of an editorial in The Nation.

[I]n the war of ideas, the Senate deal is but a stalemate, one made almost entirely on conservative terms. The GOP now goes into budget talks with sequestration as the new baseline, primed to demand longer-term cuts in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. And they still hold the gun of a US default to the nation’s head in the next debt ceiling showdown.

Surrender? Any more “victories” like this and Democrats will end up paying tribute into the GOP’s coffers.

I'm surprised to read this, because I thought what I was observing — to the extent that I did not avert my eyes — was the liberal media doing the Democratic Party's work of declaring victory.* I'm interested in seeing The Nation peel off from that strategy. It's all propaganda of one kind or another, but the strategies of propaganda interest me. It's boring when they all do the same thing, which is the  main reason I had my own personal shutdown during the shutdown.

Key line: "The GOP may be bearing the brunt of the public’s rage, but anger is also directed at Washington and government generally." The Democratic Party and its supporters in the media mostly had the strategy of blaming the GOP. Get people mad and then: Be mad at those guys. But stirring up anger is a problem:

1. There are a lot of people like me who turn away and refuse to listen when someone is directing us to be angry. Those ugly people over there are going to solve their problem whether I monitor their argument or not.

2. Then you have the kind of people who actually do take direction to the point where they become inflamed with anger. Do these hotheaded folks pay attention to the details of why these nasty people as opposed to those nasty people were more responsible for the thing they were induced to feel angry about?

Examine that key line again: "The GOP may be bearing the brunt of the public’s rage, but anger is also directed at Washington and government generally." There are 2 clauses, and if the second clause is the stronger proposition — which is likely — then the GOP came out ahead.
_______________________________

* Yesterday, I almost ended my personal shutdown to do a post based on the old saying "Declare victory and get out." Do you know the origin of that phrase?

During the Vietnam war, [U.S. Senator from Vermont George] Aiken is widely believed to have suggested that the U.S. should declare victory and bring the troops home. Actually, what he said was that "the United States could well declare unilaterally ... that we have 'won' in the sense that our armed forces are in control of most of the field and no potential enemy is in a position to establish its authority over South Vietnam," and that such a declaration "would herald the resumption of political warfare as the dominant theme in Vietnam." He added: "It may be a far-fetched proposal, but nothing else has worked."

Anyone who knows what happened when we got out of Vietnam should be skeptical of propaganda in the form of declaring victory. Frankly, I'm surprised anyone attempts the "declare victory and get out" type of statement. In my book, it's on the list of things not to say, right after "I am not a crook."

"This bill is bad for Mukwonago taxpayers, bad for the Republican Party and its reputation for having a race problem, bad for Scott Walker if he aspires to the national stage..."

"... but most importantly this bill is bad for children. You will be doing a favor to everyone including Mukwonago and your own Republican Party if you let this horribly racist legislation die a peaceful death in committee."

Try to think of what the bill in question could be. It's pending in the Wisconsin legislature. It's not the bill discussed in the previous post, which was about creating a new basis for lawsuit. This one is actually about repealing an existing basis for lawsuits. Here's another quote about the bill:

“There’s an elephant in the room that needs to be addressed directly. The elephant in the room is white Republican racism... Some have called [this bill] the ‘most racist legislation of the current generation.... That could be the kiss of death for a politician having national aspirations...” 

The politician with national aspirations is Scott Walker. What is this law that would put the stink of racism on Scott Walker and wreck his career?

Under the current law, a school district must prove that its mascot or nickname is not offensive if someone files a complaint. But the new bill stipulates that any complaints would have to include a petition signed by 10 percent of the district’s student population saying the logo or mascot is offensive, shifting the burden of proof to those filing the complaint.

“That’s like if an employee of the Ho-Chunk nation felt they were sexually harassed and had to get 10 percent of the other employees to agree (with them),” Greendeer said. “That’s absurd.”

Jennifer Kammerud, DPI’s legislative liaison, said Nass’ bill takes away the complaint process. “It is setting a level of discrimination into state statute,” Kammerud said. “You have to have your feelings validated by having 10 percent of your community agreeing with you.”

Oh! They came for the dogs! This is going to hurt.

First, they came for the WWII veterans.

Now, they've come for the dogs.

From Therapy Dogs To New Patients, Federal Shutdown Hits NIH.

[P]atients were told therapy dogs will no longer be able to come to visit them.

Is this the "Most Depressing Brain Finding Ever"?

Ironically, the author of this article lets emotion distort his thinking on the subject of the way emotion distorts thinking. He's looking at an experiment where people were asked "to interpret a table of numbers." When the numbers related to an issue they had opinions about (gun control), they made more mistakes than when the subject was neutral. They tended to err in the direction of supporting the beliefs they already had.

But emotion is part of reasoning, and it's impossible to function in the real-world lives we live without jumping steps intuitively. When you think you already know the answer, you don't study the details so much. That makes it harder to get to people with new information or to readjust biases, but it's not depressing. It's the normal functioning of the mind, and it's exactly what one would expect. We don't rebuild our understanding from ground level every time we think about a familiar topic. We'd never get as far as we do putting ideas together if we had to stop and scrutinize and recheck every element of what we believe and what we think we know.

Of course, it's important also to be able to slow down and get critical, but we have individual autonomy about when to do that, and a study that tells people to do a particular math problem does not unleash the individual will. It's an imposition of authority from the outside, and it comes with no intrinsic reason to be precise. So people take the shortcuts they think they know, and they make mistakes.

"It's just chitchat, nonsense, nothing to discuss... They picked it out of their noses and smeared it on their pieces of paper."

How Vladimir Putin answer the question: "Some newspapers have reported that you are the wealthiest man in Europe. If that is so, what are the sources of your wealth?"

That question was asked in 2008, and I read it today in a new article, at Bloomberg, titled "Vladimir Putin, the Richest Man on Earth."

Putin's answer continued this way:

"I am the wealthiest man not just in Europe but in the whole world. I collect emotions, I am wealthy in that the people of Russia have twice entrusted me with the leadership of a great nation such as Russia -- I believe that is my greatest wealth."

I collect emotions... wow, he sounds dangerous.

"I mean really, besides my grandparents, who are both dead, who is watching the nightly news?"

Said Glenn Beck, when challenged about his boast that The Blaze would put traditional news out of business.

I've given some thought over the years — it's one of my long-time thought experiments — to the idea of an afterlife that consisted only of being able to watch the TV news, showing what was going on back in the world of the living.

***

And here's an article about Glenn Beck's "Man in the Moon" show:

Part Tea Party rally, part Cirque du Soleil (my characterization, which Beck objected to), the show is a window into Beck’s mind — which he admits is riddled with attention-deficit disorder and a busy, buzzing energy — that is possibly more revealing than his famous chalkboard rants.

Strange!

Conservatives usually like to present themselves as appealing to the rational mind. This is not that.

Are we Americans supposed to be having a national conversation about Syria?

Could we go back to the national conversation about race? Because there we're at least talking about something we've been observing, sometimes even first hand, for decades. Yes, we say a lot of foolish things, and we can annoy each other, but that's within the realm of recognizable human conversation.

How are we supposed to talk about Syria? Here, read this WaPo piece: "9 questions about Syria you were too embarrassed to ask." That's the most basic primer, but it's loaded with complexities and will not — I predict — make you feel that you can participate in a debate about what we ought to do. It will only make you feel hopeless, not only about what the U.S. could do to help, but even about what you could contribute to the thinking on the subject.

This is what causes Americans to decide to trust the President, and in this case the man we're pressured to trust has asked for a consultation from Congress. (He hasn't asked for authorization. That I can see.) As this process of congressional decision-checking gets under way in the next week or so, what are you going to do?

What are you going to do about Syria?
	I will care, but nothing more, and I will trust our leaders to do the best they can.
	I will despair, trust no one in government, and direct my attention to matters closer to home.
	I will actively educate myself, observe events, and attempt to participate intelligently.
	I will rely on ideology and party affiliation to determine what to say, and I'll speak out.
	Althouse should tell me what to do, and I'll do that.
pollcode.com free polls

"I dress left. Way left. Far left, filling the pant leg."

"I have always dressed left. I will always dress left. It’s just the way it is. I do not and cannot go right. It defies logic. It does not compute. When I am with people who dress right, I feel like a member of the Star Ship Enterprise listening to Klingons without the help of a universal translator.

I feel that left dressers are open minded.

I feel that those whose appendages sway right are often – pardon the pun – rigid and dogmatic.

I feel that left dressers are compassionate.  I feel right dressers are penurious.

Ha ha. Read the whole thing. That's something I found while looking for something to put at the link on "dress right or dress left" in my "hideously asymmetrical" post.

The blogger — A Desperate Man — is Stephen Metcalfe, who's a playwright, screenwriter and director. His film credits include some movies I've seen, like "Arachnophobia" and "Pretty Woman."

The conservatives' high ground on race is colorblindness, and they'd be fools to abandon it.

That's a general piece of advice I'd like to deliver, prompted by this specific headline, seen just now at Twitchy:

Slain World War II vet Delbert Belton honored at candlelight vigil [photos]

I know there are those who think there's a need to rebalance public opinion after the distortions that surrounded the George Zimmerman case, which skewed racial discourse in this country over the past year, but it's a terrible idea to go looking for incidents in where the killers are black and the victims are white and to exploit them in what seems like an effort to undo the distortions. I saw this happening earlier this week over the Christopher Lane murder, I labeled it "counter-Trayvonistic," which was a too-subtle way to say: Don't fight skewing with skewing in the opposite direction.

Conservatives have rested on the principle of colorblindness for a long time, and they've taken abuse for it. Look at how left liberals abuse Chief Justice Roberts for writing, "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." They consider that kind of talk naive (at best). They push the perceived sophistication of what Justice Blackmun said back in the first affirmative action case: "In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way."

Those are the 2 well-defined and socially presentable opinions in this country, and decent, sincere Americans have argued from these positions for decades. Now, we're seeing some conservatives who seem frustrated by this taking account of race that's been done on the left. They seem to think it's a good time to spotlight violence committed by black people. This is not a good idea! It's fine to mourn Shorty, but these candlelight vigils are intended to stir hearts the way hearts were stirred at the Trayvon Martin demonstrations.

Trayvon Martin — an individual human being — was used by demagogues to score points about the suffering of black people in America, but this is not a game, and it is delusion to imagine that there is a need to score points on some imagined other side. This is not a game. There is no score. And we are all on the same side.

To paraphrase the Chief Justice: The way to stop skewing public opinion based on race is to stop skewing public opinion based on race.

To stir hearts counter-Trayvonistically is to nurture feelings that white people are oppressed by black people. This alternative to colorblindness is profoundly stupid. 1. It abandons the easy to express, principled position that many people perceive as the high ground. 2. It steps into the arena of taking account of race, where the left liberals would love to take you on. And 3. It gives air to the white supremacists among us. These people have been outcasts for a long time, but they exist, perhaps not quite yet recognizing what they are.

What sparks catch fire in that candlelight vigil for Shorty?

"Why Conservatives Say No."

"Opposition to amnesty and same-sex marriage isn't bigotry, it's a fear of unintended consequences."

"Not just the NSA... Political candidates, political parties, Super PACS and dark-money groups are among the most ambitious data miners around."

"They use data to supercharge their fund-raising, to target multimillion-dollar ad buys and to stir passions and fears at election time," writes John Nichols at The Nation.