In his speech today in the White House East Room, President Obama clearly indicated that he is going to press for a comprehensive, and not a piecemeal or “skinny,” health care reform bill. He also made it abundantly clear that he will accept, if necessary, a party-line simple majority vote in the House and the Senate in order to get the bill through. Reconciliation here we come.

During his campaign and throughout year one, Obama promised to “change the way Washington works” and emphasized bipartisanship, especially during the debate over health care reform. Apparently, he believed that if he just tried hard enough to get Republicans on board, some of them would work with him to solve our problems.

But no more. As John Judis writes:

But it is now evident that Obama’s approach was what he understood about American politics—it was the guiding light gleaned from his years as an Illinois state senator—and he planned to apply it to Congress. And it was, of course, nonsense. Republicans were able to use Obama’s naiveté about their motives to undermine his initiatives. As Noam Scheiber explains in his profile of Rahm Emanuel, the principal obstacle to getting health care reform through Congress last year was Obama’s dogged insistence last summer that Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus continue to plug away at nailing down a bipartisan agreement. What Obama got was not an amicable agreement but a summer of discontent, highlighted by Senator Charles Grassley’s  denunciation of Democratic “death panels” and by the emergence of the Tea Party movement.

But it’s not an easy job being president. It took Bill Clinton most of his first term to figure out how to do domestic and foreign policy. Like Clinton, Obama has stumbled, but his slip-ups have been more dramatic because, with the economy cratering and two wars raging, the stakes have been higher from the first.

However, in Obama’s speech today, and in his artful performance at the health care summit last week, he showed that he has learned something from his first year in office. Obama is now using the rhetoric of bipartisanship as Schmitt and other liberals thought he was doing in 2008: He is using it to paint Republicans as intransigent. He clearly no longer believes that a bipartisan agreement on health care is possible.

The challenges are still daunting:

How to frame government initiatives in a way that acknowledges but also overcomes American anti-statism has been, and remains, a major political challenge for Democrats. But in beginning to draw clear distinctions between the Democratic and Republican approaches, Obama has taken the first important step toward meeting that challenge.

It will be difficult to succeed in a country that is reflexively anti-government. Judis is guardedly optimistic.

I am a bit less so.

It may be that American voters are so profoundly delusional that there is little Obama (or anyone else) can do to rescue us from the ignorant tirades of tea partiers, global warming denialists, and free market fanatics.

This is simply caving in to the politics of fear.

The implicit argument for military trials is that our civilian judicial system can’t handle these terrorists, who must have super-natural powers that would enable them to escape from custody before our eyes, despite the proven competence of the regular court system that has successfully put countless terrorists on trial.

As David Shorr writes:

As we build up the terrorists into some kind of superhumans, are we losing sight of how this diminishes us? It seems to me that this shows a profound lack of faith in our system, our values. Think of the contradiction at work here: America is a mighty and upstanding nation; it should cower in fear.

The thing about worst-case scenarios is that they are a slippery slope toward darker and darker predictions. Where do you stop? What keeps the scenarios moored in reality? And this is the really disturbing thing, the politics of the terror threat are propelling this great nation toward a policy based essentially on a freak-out.

These attacks on our judicial system are of course made by conservatives who claim to be patriotic proselytizers for American strength.

Dwight Furrow is author of

Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America

For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com

Christian-based materials dominate a growing home-school education market that encompasses more than 1.5 million students in the U.S. And for most home-school parents, a Bible-based version of the Earth’s creation is exactly what they want. Federal statistics from 2007 show 83 percent of home-schooling parents want to give their children “religious or moral instruction.”

“The majority of home-schoolers self-identify as evangelical Christians,” said Ian Slatter, a spokesman for the Home School Legal Defense Association. “Most home-schoolers will definitely have a sort of creationist component to their home-school program.”

Those who don’t, however, often feel isolated and frustrated from trying to find a textbook that fits their beliefs.

Two of the best-selling biology textbooks stack the deck against evolution, said some science educators who reviewed sections of the books at the request of The Associated Press.

“I feel fairly strongly about this. These books are promulgating lies to kids,” said Jerry Coyne, an ecology and evolution professor at the University of Chicago.

This story has provoked many scientists, such as Coyne, to reiterate the harm such materials are causing children.

And the pushback has begun. Check out any science blog discussing this issue and you will find in the comments section some truly vile invective from people I can only assume are “Christians”.

Since we try to keep the language on this website relatively clean, I will not post the worst cases, but check out this post by Jerry Coyne if you want samples.

As Coyne writes:

Ah, there’s nothing so vile as a Christian insulted!  To those who are constantly whining about the “incivility” of atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, I suggest that you might first have a look at the behavior of some Christians.

One sort of reforming wants to spend more money to improve education despite the fact that throwing money at the problem hasn’t worked. The other sort wants to use standardized tests to measure teacher performance, institute merit pay for successful teachers and fire the unsuccessful teachers. But this assumes that teachers have the knowledge and skills to teach well but are just too lazy to do the job without a financial incentive. This is a wholly unwarranted assumption that has circulated among right-wing, anti-union groups for years and has now escaped into the mainstream, apparently influencing the Obama Administration.

Lack of motivation is not the problem. Most teachers are dedicated people who care deeply about their students. Teaching complex material to unprepared, unmotivated, distracted students will always be a difficult challenge at best. But we have to get better at it if our society is to flourish. Punitive measures are not sufficient.

Most recent attempts to find models of education that work involve cherry picking the best teachers, administrators, and students, putting them together with adequate funding and some new, bright idea about curriculum; and then pointing to their success as evidence that—? Well, I guess that good students will learn from good teachers. But we already knew that.

The problem with these experiments is that they are not scalable. We need thousands of new teachers each year to teach millions of students. Thus, neither the teachers nor the students will be the “cream of the crop”. Educational policy cannot be about hiring the best and the brightest—we need too many teachers for that. Among a workforce of millions of teachers, there will be some good ones and some bad ones. But rewarding the good ones; and firing the bad ones will have little impact on outcomes. What matters is the average teacher. The successful educational policy will get average people to perform to the best of their ability.

This article in the New York Times Magazine is interesting because it reports on new research in teacher training that actually might do some good.

Working with Hyman Bass, a mathematician at the University of Michigan, Ball began to theorize that while teaching math obviously required subject knowledge, the knowledge seemed to be something distinct from what she had learned in math class. It’s one thing to know that 307 minus 168 equals 139; it is another thing to be able understand why a third grader might think that 261 is the right answer. Mathematicians need to understand a problem only for themselves; math teachers need both to know the math and to know how 30 different minds might understand (or misunderstand) it. Then they need to take each mind from not getting it to mastery. And they need to do this in 45 minutes or less. This was neither pure content knowledge nor what educators call pedagogical knowledge, a set of facts independent of subject matter, like Lemov’s techniques. It was a different animal altogether. Ball named it Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching, or M.K.T. She theorized that it included everything from the “common” math understood by most adults to math that only teachers need to know, like which visual tools to use to represent fractions (sticks? blocks? a picture of a pizza?) or a sense of the everyday errors students tend to make when they start learning about negative numbers. At the heart of M.K.T., she thought, was an ability to step outside of your own head. “Teaching depends on what other people think,” Ball told me, “not what you think.”

The idea that just knowing math was not enough to teach it seemed legitimate, but Ball wanted to test her theory. Working with Hill, the Harvard professor, and another colleague, she developed a multiple-choice test for teachers. The test included questions about common math, like whether zero is odd or even (it’s even), as well as questions evaluating the part of M.K.T. that is special to teachers. Hill then cross-referenced teachers’ results with their students’ test scores. The results were impressive: students whose teacher got an above-average M.K.T. score learned about three more weeks of material over the course of a year than those whose teacher had an average score, a boost equivalent to that of coming from a middle-class family rather than a working-class one. The finding is especially powerful given how few properties of teachers can be shown to directly affect student learning. Looking at data from New York City teachers in 2006 and 2007, a team of economists found many factors that did not predict whether their students learned successfully. One of two that were more promising: the teacher’s score on the M.K.T. test, which they took as part of a survey compiled for the study. (Another, slightly less powerful factor was the selectivity of the college a teacher attended as an undergraduate.)

Ball also administered a similar test to a group of mathematicians, 60 percent of whom bombed on the same few key questions.

The whole article is worth reading. But what stands out  is the recognition that teachers need to know more than subject matter and educational theory—the two main elements of teacher training. They also need a detailed understanding of how unformed minds can misunderstand the subject matter.

I suspect that the difference between an experienced teacher and an inexperienced teacher is that the experienced teacher has a wealth of information about what is hard about the subject they teach.

Dwight Furrow is author of

Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America

For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com

The United States is hardly the only country facing tough economic times right now. But a survey of the worldwide response to the recession suggests that American higher education may be uniquely disadvantaged by the way state and federal governments are responding in the U.S., compared to how the rest of the world is dealing with the crisis.

Most governments elsewhere have avoided the “uncoordinated cutting of funding for higher education that we generally see in U.S. state systems,” says a report being released today by the Center for Studies in Higher Education, at the University of California at Berkeley.

In part, the study says that is because the rest of the world — including many nations facing severe cash shortfalls themselves — embrace the Keynesian idea of using government investment to push an economic recovery. But John Aubrey Douglass, the author of the report and a senior research fellow at the center, also sees problems in the structure of higher education finance in the United States.

The vast majority of students in the United State attend public colleges and universities, which are depending on state governments for operating support for education (even if the research universities among them receive substantial federal funding for research).

What this means, Douglass writes, is that in the United States, most colleges are dependent on units of government that lack the authority to borrow – and so are severely constrained in their ability to pump more money into the economy (at least barring tax increases that aren’t politically popular). That’s not true in much of the rest of the world, he notes, where federal systems for supporting higher education are more prevalent.

The story goes on to describe what other countries—China, Taiwan, Netherlands, and France—have done to avoid the draconian cuts to education that California and other states are experiencing.

The sad fact of the matter is that we simply do not value education much in this country, at least not as a social good to which the nation must be committed. Many people are pleased with their own education and are perfectly willing to see others go without.

In a knowledge-based economy that spells disaster. It is hard to see how the United States will maintain its position as a beacon of freedom and opportunity without a functioning educational system.

Dwight Furrow is author of

Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America

For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com

This chart tracks the spending cuts that self-identified conservatives want to see.

Foreign aid comprises only about 1% of the annual federal budget. Cutting it to zero would do nothing for our budget deficit.

I have no idea how conservatives define welfare programs, which 35% want to cut. However, only 10% want to cut aid to the poor and only about 5% want to cut social security. In 2008, safety net programs (excluding health care and social security) accounted for only 11% of the budget. And conservatives have been opposed to cuts in Medicare recently, which would generate substantial savings.

The point to take away from this is that there is no consensus on cutting anything and the cuts many support would amount to very little.

We know conservatives say they stand for smaller government, lower spending, and lower taxes. But the only idea they agree on is lower taxes, which in the absence of cuts in spending only lead to higher deficits.

This is why budget deficits increased enormously under Reagan and Bush I and II.

There is no coherent conservative philosophy here on the size of government or budget management. In the end, conservatism comes down to one idea—just cut my taxes. All the bleating about the size of government or “mortgaging our children’s future” is just so much blather.

Dwight Furrow is author of

Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America

For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com

He cites data from a 2009 study conducted by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation:

We rank fourth in science and technology researchers as a share of our workforce, but only 20th in our rate of change over the past decade; fifth in corporate R&D investment, but 17th in the rate of change; fourth in government R&D investment, but 15th in the rate of change; seventh in broadband, but 22nd in rate of change; first in GDP per working-age adult, but 16th in rate of change; and so on. […] (In seven of the 16 ITIF indicators, we’ve actually gone backwards since 1999.)

The reason according to Galston:

The federal budget and tax code are honeycombed with unproductive payoffs to special interests; it’s time to purge them. And the private economy has been dominated by a financial sector that’s more interested in transferring wealth (to itself) than in creating wealth through sensible investments. Perhaps the 2008-2009 financial crash will force bright young people to stop producing complex derivatives and start working on innovations that improve our lives.

He doesn’t say which “unproductive payoffs to special interests” but I suspect subsidies to oil companies and corporate farms are at the top of the list.

What made that kamikaze mission eventful was less the deranged act itself than the curious reaction of politicians on the right who gave it a pass — or, worse, flirted with condoning it. Stack was a lone madman, and it would be both glib and inaccurate to call him a card-carrying Tea Partier or a “Tea Party terrorist.” But he did leave behind a manifesto whose frothing anti-government, anti-tax rage overlaps with some of those marching under the Tea Party banner. That rant inspired like-minded Americans to create instant Facebook shrines to his martyrdom. Soon enough, some cowed politicians, including the newly minted Tea Party hero Scott Brown, were publicly empathizing with Stack’s credo — rather than risk crossing the most unforgiving brigade in their base.Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa, even rationalized Stack’s crime. “It’s sad the incident in Texas happened,” he said, “but by the same token, it’s an agency that is unnecessary. And when the day comes when that is over and we abolish the I.R.S., it’s going to be a happy day for America.” No one in King’s caucus condemned these remarks. Then again, what King euphemized as “the incident” took out just 1 of the 200 workers in the Austin building: Vernon Hunter, a 68-year-old Vietnam veteran nearing his I.R.S. retirement. Had Stack the devastating weaponry and timing to match the death toll of 168 inflicted by Timothy McVeigh on a federal building in Oklahoma in 1995, maybe a few of the congressman’s peers would have cried foul.

It is not glib or inaccurate to invoke Oklahoma City in this context, because the acrid stench of 1995 is back in the air. Two days before Stack’s suicide mission, The Times published David Barstow’s chilling, months-long investigation of the Tea Party movement. Anyone who was cognizant during the McVeigh firestorm would recognize the old warning signs re-emerging from the mists of history. The Patriot movement. “The New World Order,” with its shadowy conspiracies hatched by the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. Sandpoint, Idaho. White supremacists. Militias.Barstow confirmed what the Southern Poverty Law Center had found in its report last year: the unhinged and sometimes armed anti-government right that was thought to have vaporized after its Oklahoma apotheosis is making a comeback. And now it is finding common cause with some elements of the diverse, far-flung and still inchoate Tea Party movement. All it takes is a few self-styled “patriots” to sow havoc.

Rich is not identifying domestic terrorists with the Republican Party:

“They are not to be confused with the Party of No holding forth in Washington — a party that, after all, is now positioning itself as a defender of Medicare spending. What we are talking about here is the Party of No Government at All.” But Rich does quote a GOP presidential aspirant, former MN Governor Tim Pawlenty, who recently urged an audience to emulate Tiger Woods’s wife and “take a 9-iron and smash the window out of big government in this country.” Rich adds:

Such violent imagery and invective, once largely confined to blogs and talk radio, is now spreading among Republicans in public office or aspiring to it. Last year Michele Bachmann, the redoubtable Tea Party hero and Minnesota congresswoman, set the pace by announcing that she wanted “people in Minnesota armed and dangerous” to oppose Obama administration climate change initiatives. In Texas, the Tea Party favorite for governor, Debra Medina, is positioning herself to the right of the incumbent, Rick Perry — no mean feat given that Perry has suggested that Texas could secede from the union. A state sovereignty zealot, Medina reminded those at a rally that “the tree of freedom is occasionally watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots.”

This goes beyond mere hypocrisy. If Stark had been brown or a Muslim would conservatives be so supportive? Aside from the thankfully minimal but nevertheless tragic loss of life, is there a difference between Stark and the other terrorists who have taken American lives?

Liberals who explained, without justifying, Muslim terrorism after 9/11 as a response to American foreign policy were castigated and called unpatriotic (and worse) by the mainstream media.

Yet conservatives are given a free pass when they seem to condone violence against Americans.

Scientific American recently published an article challenging the conventional wisdom.

The problem is not a lack of science PhD’s but instead a lack of secure, well-paying jobs, a situation caused by the re-structuring of labor markets that has been going on in academia for decades.

30 or 40 years ago, roughly 75% of science faculty were permanent employees. Today, that percentage has slipped to less than 25% by some estimates. Most science research is done by graduate students or temporary employees with low pay and no job security and little hope of career advancement.

“There is no scientist shortage,” says Harvard University economist Richard Freeman, a leading expert on the academic labor force. The great lack in the American scientific labor market, he and other observers argue, is not top-flight technical talent but attractive career opportunities for the approximately 30,000 scientists and engineers—about 18,000 of them American citizens—who earn PhDs in the U.S. each year. […]

Most PhDs hired into faculty-level jobs get so-called “soft-money” posts, dependent on the renewal of year-to-year funding rather than the traditional tenure-track positions that offer long-term security.

It is no wonder that talented people choose to go into law, finance, or medicine that offer better career prospects. Yet, politicians and the media tell a different story.

Despite these realities, the existence of a technical talent dearth is nonetheless almost “universally accepted” in political circles, where it plays an important role in shaping national policy on science funding, education and immigration, says Ron Hira, assistant professor of public policy at Rochester Institute of Technology. “Almost no one in Washington” recognizes the “glut” of scientists, nor the damage that lack or opportunity is doing to the incentives that formerly attracted many of America’s most gifted young people to seek scientific and engineering careers, he says.

If the claim that the U.S. is not deficient in producing science Ph.Ds is false, why is it so often repeated?

As usual, when you want to know the answer to a question, follow the money.

University administrators save money with this system because they don’t have to allocate scarce resources to hiring permanent faculty; state governments (and taxpayers) are happy because they don’t have to support the universities; the few privileged scientists who administer grants are happy because all the money is funneled through their departments; corporations are happy because a depressed labor market keeps the salaries of their science employees low and they can argue for the need for more cheap foreign employees through special H-1B visas; and those politicians and members of the business community who seek to defund American universities and privatize education see their dream continue its ineluctable advance.

Meanwhile, our science-based economy suffers:

…the U.S. …finds itself increasingly dependent on an inherently unreliable stream of young foreign scientists, mostly in the country on short-term, non-resident visas, to do much of the routine labor that powers American research. The American research enterprise—the indispensable engine of national prosperity and the world’s leading innovation establishment—has therefore become vulnerable, observers say, to conditions beyond its borders and its control. At the same time, experts note that recruiting sufficient amounts of the talent needed for vital defense-oriented scientific and engineering work that requires security clearances has become increasingly difficult.

Ain’t capitalism grand?

The Dems and Obama explained why our health care system is broken, why individual mandates and subsidies are necessary to fix it, and why banning pre-existing conditions without mandates will not work.

The Republicans prattled on about interstate insurance, health care accounts and high-risk pools. And the Democrats explained why none of those will do anything to reform the system and will cause insurance costs to sky-rocket.

The good news was that there was very little nonsense about “death panels” or socialism, although Republicans stuck to their goal of misleading the public by bleating about government take over of health care, abortion subsidies, and strong arm Democratic tactics.

If we had a rational public discourse in this country, the debate about health care would be over and we could expect overwhelming public support for the Democratic plan.

But we don’t have a rational public discourse, in part, because the press will not report what is actually happening.

Although the Democrats rightly emphasized how many Republican ideas were in their proposal, anyone who listened closely or who has been following this year-long debate knows that Republican demands to start over are a thinly disguised attempt to derail any reform. They have one goal, which they have stated explicitly, and that is to make sure the Democrats don’t get credit for another policy that will help people.

But you will not hear the Washington Press corps tell it like it is. And 30 second clips on the nightly news are likely to show the “reasonable” Republicans pleading for bi-partisanship, giving the casual viewer the impression that the mean Democrats are up to their old arrogant tricks.

I suppose we have made some progress. Opponents can no longer claim their ideas have not had a fair hearing, and the Democrats have put health-care reform back on the agenda.

Democrats need to stop timidly worrying about Senate decorum, use the reconciliation process, and pass the damn bill.

Dwight Furrow is author of

Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America

For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com

Via Brian Leiter, The Atlantic lays out the disturbing long-term consequences of our current recession and the failure to provide adequate stimulus to the economy—both, by the way, the consequences of a conservative ideology that may be back in power in 2010. Who better to put out a fire than an arsonist?

[I]n fact a whole generation of young adults is likely to see its life chances permanently diminished by this recession. Lisa Kahn, an economist at Yale, has studied the impact of recessions on the lifetime earnings of young workers […] She found that, all else equal, for every one-percentage-point increase in the national unemployment rate, the starting income of new graduates fell by as much as 7 percent; the unluckiest graduates of the decade, who emerged into the teeth of the 1981–82 recession, made roughly 25 percent less in their first year than graduates who stepped into boom times.

But what’s truly remarkable is the persistence of the earnings gap. Five, 10, 15 years after graduation, after untold promotions and career changes spanning booms and busts, the unlucky graduates never closed the gap. Seventeen years after graduation, those who had entered the workforce during inhospitable times were still earning 10 percent less on average than those who had emerged into a more bountiful climate. […]

When Kahn looked more closely at the unlucky graduates at mid-career, she found some surprising characteristics. They were significantly less likely to work in professional occupations or other prestigious spheres. And they clung more tightly to their jobs: average job tenure was unusually long. People who entered the workforce during the recession “didn’t switch jobs as much, and particularly for young workers, that’s how you increase wages,” Kahn told me. This behavior may have resulted from a lingering risk aversion, born of a tough start. But a lack of opportunities may have played a larger role, she said: when you’re forced to start work in a particularly low-level job or unsexy career, it’s easy for other employers to dismiss you as having low potential. Moving up, or moving on to something different and better, becomes more difficult….

The article goes on to provide evidence that people who don’t establish themselves in the job market within two years tend to suffer long-term psychological and physical damage that continues to inhibit their careers even if they eventually find steady work, suffering from increased rates of alcoholism, depression, mortality, and apathy.

I hope things turn around before our students hit the job market.

I don’t know what this means for the conservative movement.The conference consists largely of conservative activists who may not represent the views of conservative voters.

Paul has a disturbing racist past (see the linked article for the details) and he advocates policies that will be rejected by mainstream voters. He has zero chance of winning the Republican nomination for President.

But votes like this will make it hard for Republicans to shake their image as a party that is unwelcoming to non-whites.

Sarah Palin’s lack of support is a surprise as well.

The New York Times on Sunday had a story about this chronic unemployment, which contains the following quote by Allen Sinai:

“American business is about maximizing shareholder value,” said Allen Sinai, chief global economist at the research firm Decision Economics. “You basically don’t want workers. You hire less, and you try to find capital equipment to replace them.”

Allen Sinai is no left wing academic—he has been for many years a prominent forecaster of economic trends for major corporations and governments.

As Brian Leiter asks:

“One wonders if Mr. Sinai knows the pedigree for this insight about capitalism?  Or if he understands the consequence of this logic?”

The idea that capitalism will destroy itself by seeking efficiencies that will ultimately throw the people who buy its products out of work was one of Karl Marx’s main ideas.

Now it is being confirmed by the capitalists themselves.

Via Colin Farrelly:

Political philosophers interested in abstract debates about equality vs priority and sufficiency should find this recent study in Nature Neuroscience of interest (as well as this News piece).

It is commonly assumed that the impulse to maximize one’s own self-interest is automatic and can be contrasted with the deliberative, reflective sentiments of prosocial actors who care about equality. But it seems that the decision-making of the latter is also automatic emotional processing. Here is the abstract of the paper:

‘Social value orientation’ characterizes individual differences in anchoring attitudes toward the division of resources. Here, by contrasting people with prosocial and individualistic orientations using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we demonstrate that degree of inequity aversion in prosocials is predictable from amygdala activity and unaffected by cognitive load. This result suggests that automatic emotional processing in the amygdala lies at the core of prosocial value orientation.

This is important research in support of an ethic of care and its political implications. It suggests that our concern for fairness and equality is rooted in the emotions, not in our capacity to reason impartially.

It supports my main argument in Reviving the Left.

Percentage of Americans who favor socialism: 20
Percentage of Americans involved in Tea Party Movement: 11

Number of mentions of “Tea Party” past month in Lexis radio and tv transcript search: 1042*
Number of mentions of “socialism” past month in Lexis radio and tv transcript search: 69+

Percentage of Americans who say it is unacceptable to take the Public Option out of the health care bill: 44

Number of mentions of the “public option” past month in Lexis radio and tv transcript search: 235

Only 9 percent of Tea Partiers are urban, whereas a majority of Americans are.
Tea partiers are half as big as proponents of socialism in the US body politic, but corporate media gives them 15 times more mention, and overwhelmingly more positive mention.

Although nearly one of every two Americans is committed to a public option in the health care bill, the public option received only 1/4 as many mentions in US mass media in the past month as Tea Partiers, who are supported by 1 in 9 Americans.
————
*Often corporate media transcripts show the tiny ‘Tea Party’ movement taken seriously, praised.
*Most mentions of socialism, the political-economy preference of a fifth of Americans, in US corporate media are pejorative, occurring in stories about North Korea or China, or as insults directed at President Barack Obama. (In a recent Rasmussen poll, 52% of Americans supported capitalism and 20% supported socialism. Some 27% did not know which they supported.)