Video of the day

Time lapse from the ISS.  Cool!

Minority report

Very nice report from Pew on Hispanic voters and the upcoming election.  What I like best is this chart making clear that contrary to what Republicans keep telling themselves, Latinos are a liberal voting group.  Take special note of the fact that despite the high rate of Roman Catholicism, their abortion views are really no different from anybody else:

And while Hispanics have become quite the reliably Democratic group, here’s the problem for Democrats:

Meanwhile, Chait points out (taken from yet other Pew research) the absolute massive advantage for Democrats among non-whites in Congressional polling:

Of course, this can be offset by whites becoming more Republican, but the non-white trend seems much more potent and more clear.  That’s why if I were the GOP, I would nominate Marco Rubio in 2016 for the powerful symbolic message.

Endorsement of the day

Despite the awfulness of NC legislature, I’m privileged to be represented by two great guys– Duane Hall in NC House 11 and Josh Stein in the State Senate.  Since Stein, of course due to gerrymandering, has a very safe district the Republicans could run a nutjob against him without fear of losing a winnable district.  Anyway, love the summary from the Indy Weekly (a great local alternative paper) in their endorsement of Stein:

Molotov Mitchell is an idiosyncratic, ultraconservative gun-obsessed fundamentalist Christian who owns a Krav Maga studio here in the Triangle. He has the word “Zealot” tattooed on him and has habitually gone after Islam as “violently intolerant.” He’s a scary, eloquent, violently anti-abortion, marriage-is-one-man-and-one-woman deep Internet Glenn Beck who has amazingly gained some traction with the North Carolina Republican Party, to their own detriment.

I’d be curious to see what would happen if this guy was in an actually competitive district.

Photo of the day

From the Telegraph’s Animal Photos of the Week.  Not to anthropomorphize, but that look on the mama lion’s face sure makes the picture:

A female lion with her offspring in Kenya’s Maasai Mara game reservePicture: Andy and Sarah Skinner/Rossparry

We finally know the real horror of Ebola

It makes people stupid.

Here’s a litany of people acting incredibly stupid in the face of Ebola.  I don’t have to explain to you how monumentally stupid a school district is for keeping out kids who came from Rwanda.  Those administrators should be fired for gross incompetence.  But my favorite is what Syracuse University has done.  A University damnit!:

And it’s not just the unenlightened: Syracuse University, a supposed place of knowledge, uninvited photojournalist Michel du Cille, who had been covering Ebola in Liberia, despite the fact that he had not shown any symptoms after the recommended 21-day monitoring period:

The school’s dean, Lorraine Branham, said a student who was researching du Cille prior to the workshop found out he had recently returned from Liberia and expressed concern. Provost Eric Spina spoke with health officials and made the call.

“It’s a disappointment to me,” du Cille said. “I’m pissed off and embarrassed and completely weirded out that a journalism institution that should be seeking out facts and details is basically pandering to hysteria.”

In the linked article, the dean references an “abundance of caution.”  Honestly, one of the most insidious phrases in the English language.  I swear, it’s pretty much short-hand for “I’m going to do something incredibly unnecessary because I am irrationally fearful.”

A Dean?!  I don’t know what I’d do if my own university were this stupid.

Let’s cap this off with a terrific Borowitz report headline:

Study: Fear of Ebola Highest Among People Who Did Not Pay Attention During Math and Science Classes