Greg Sargent also has a nice deconstruction.

Got that.  Why worry about fighting terrorism when there's conservatives to be hired?  Drum digs into the DOJ report and shows just how absurd and pathetic this was (from the report):

He was an experienced terrorism prosecutor and had successfully prosecuted a high-profile terrorism case for which he received the Attorney General's Award for Exceptional Service....Battle stated that Voris told him that the candidate was head and shoulders above the other candidates who had applied for the counterterrorism detail.

Sounds like a great guy. But there was a problem:

The candidate's wife was a prominent local Democrat elected official and vice-chairman of a local Democratic Party. She also ran several Democratic congressional campaigns....Battle, Kelly, and EOUSA Deputy Director Nowacki all told us that Goodling refused to allow the candidate to be detailed to EOUSA solely on the basis of his wife's political party affiliation.

....Because EOUSA had been unable to fill the counterterrorism detail after Goodling vetoed this candidate, a current EOUSA detailee was asked to assume EOUSA's counterterrorism portfolio....He had no counterterrorism experience and had less than the minimum of 5 years of federal criminal prosecution experience required by the EOUSA job announcement. Battle, Nowacki, Kelly, and Voris all said they thought that he was not qualified for the position, since he had no counterterrorism experience. The replacement candidate was a registered Republican who Goodling had interviewed and approved before he was selected for his EOUSA detail.

Make no mistake, this disgusting display of partisan politics ahead of national security rests squarely on George Bush's shoulders.  This sort of political hackery clearly has the fingerprints of Karl Rove all over it, but Rove was not operating in a vacuum.  I don't care where you fall on the political spectrum, this is just indefensible, and if you are tempted to defend it, you really need a reality check on the partisan blinders you are wearing.

Kaplan nicely points out that how this fits into the most pervasive biases of press coverage.  Journalists craft a narrative or conventional wisdom for campaigns, and then despite all potential evidence the contrary, they stick with it. 

If you are curious as to why these particular policies are unsound, you can read the rest of the article.  I'm sold.

One thing I've always wondered about, though, is shouldn't it be just as potentially dangerous to hold an involved conversation with a passenger?  Apparently not-- phone conversations and in-car conversations are actually quite different:

As long as the Model-T has been on the road, people have been conversing with the passengers in their vehicles, if only to scream at the pesky kids, "Shut up! I'm trying to drive!" But there's a difference between talking to somebody in the car and on the phone. Most passengers in the car adjust their conversation to what's happening on the road, quieting down when traffic gets hectic or even pointing out hazards up ahead, acting as a second set of eyes. The person on the other end of a cellphone call might not know you're driving, much less be aware of the road conditions. "The difficulty is that the party on the other line has no sense of your driving situation and just yaks, and the driver elects to do it, too," explains Paul Allan Green, research professor at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, where he leads the Driver Interface Group.

Inside a car, there can be natural lulls in the conversation of 20 or 30 seconds, and there is no awkwardness associated with it. Not so on the cellphone call, where there's more social pressure on the driver to hold up his or her end of the conversation, if only to assure the other party that the call hasn't been dropped. "There is all sorts of social pressure to continue the conversation and not break it off," says Green. When a driver does stop talking to focus on the road, his caller is likely to ask, "Hey, can you hear me? Are you there?" The caller tries "to reengage the driver at the wrong time," says Strayer.

Further, researchers find that people tend to be more chatty in a cell conversation than an in-car one. "Cellphone conversations are more intense than in-car conversation," says Paul Atchley, professor of psychology at the University of Kansas. That intensity can be measured. Researchers in England studied drivers' conversations with both passengers and callers. They found that people used a higher number of words per minute on cellphone conversations.

In the end, car passengers just have more skin in the game. "People in the car have their own safety at risk," says Atchley. "It's to their advantage to not put the driver in the dangerous situation, so we as passengers tend to edit ourselves pretty effectively."

The larger point is that laws banning cell phone use unless the cell is hands-free are pretty pointless:

Researchers doubt that banning hand-held phones gets to the root of the problem: the conversation. Sure, it's safer to have both hands on the wheel, but no one is passing laws banning stick shifts. Atchley believes that the new cellphone laws may be counterproductive, instilling a false sense of security, since they may lull drivers into thinking that gabbing on the hands-free phone is just fine.

I generally try and keep my own automotive cell phone conversations limited to situations where traffic is light and I'm quite familiar with my route, but I'm definitely going to be more cognizant of the risks.

Of course, not all political scientists agree on the cluelessness of the American voter...

Americans "don't sound the way the high priests of culture want them to sound," says Samuel L. Popkin, author of "The Reasoning Voter," who tends to give voters more credit rather than less. "They use their own language. They process a lot more than they can recall in interviews. They have a lot better sense of who's on their side and who isn't than they're often given credit for."

Among the authors of the new research, is one of my Ohio State mentors:

"If they know they're Republican and have been happy that way, they'll stay Republican," says another of the book's four authors, Herb Weisberg, who chairs the political science department at Ohio State University. Even for those voters who do rethink their allegiance to a given party -- because, say, the party in power has fouled things up -- "if times get better, they'll get back to where they were," Weisberg says.

The article actually does a nice job summarizing a significant political science debate.  If you'd like a better understanding of just what Political Scientists are killing trees for to fill up journals on a subject that is actually pretty interesting, give it a read. 

This finding is just really great.  You are not as attractive as you think:

For that matter, humans do not necessarily see the face in the mirror either. In a report titled ?Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Enhancement in Self-Recognition,? which appears online in The Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Nicholas Epley and Erin Whitchurch described experiments in which people were asked to identify pictures of themselves amid a lineup of distracter faces. Participants identified their personal portraits significantly quicker when their faces were computer enhanced to be 20 percent more attractive. They were also likelier, when presented with images of themselves made prettier, homelier or left untouched, to call the enhanced image their genuine, unairbrushed face. Such internalized photoshoppery is not simply the result of an all-purpose preference for prettiness: when asked to identify images of strangers in subsequent rounds of testing, participants were best at spotting the unenhanced faces.

And here's something that Kim refuses to believe (and, she's not alone):

When we look in the mirror, our relative beauty is not the only thing we misjudge. In a series of studies, Dr. Bertamini and his colleagues have interviewed scores of people about what they think the mirror shows them. They have asked questions like, Imagine you are standing in front of a bathroom mirror; how big do you think the image of your face is on the surface? And what would happen to the size of that image if you were to step steadily backward, away from the glass?

People overwhelmingly give the same answers. To the first question they say, well, the outline of my face on the mirror would be pretty much the size of my face. As for the second question, that?s obvious: if I move away from the mirror, the size of my image will shrink with each step.

Both answers, it turns out, are wrong. Outline your face on a mirror, and you will find it to be exactly half the size of your real face. Step back as much as you please, and the size of that outlined oval will not change: it will remain half the size of your face (or half the size of whatever part of your body you are looking at), even as the background scene reflected in the mirror steadily changes. Importantly, this half-size rule does not apply to the image of someone else moving about the room. If you sit still by the mirror, and a friend approaches or moves away, the size of the person?s image in the mirror will grow or shrink as our innate sense says it should.

There's a few more interesting tidbits in the full article.