Stephen Colbert was right, as usual. Reality, the stuff we can see and feel, as opposed to the excited vaporings of Teabaggers and their demented billionaire sponsors, points to liberal conclusions. Over the flip, see three examples published on the same day:
We've known in our guts that deficit posturing is a rich person's game. Now here are the hard data to prove it:
As Congress and President Obama wrestle over the "sequester" and other measures that would dramatically cut government spending, the first systematic study of the political attitudes of wealthy Americans indicates that the top 1 percent of U.S. wealth-holders (people with $8 million or so in net worth) put a much higher priority on reducing budget deficits and cutting entitlement spending than most Americans do.
http://phys.org/...
But wait! There's more! Outsourcing companies misusing H1-B visas? Tell me it isn't so:
The Top 10 users of H-1B visas in FY 2012 were companies who specialize in shipping American jobs offshore, according to an analysis of government data by Computerworld magazine. The analysis comes at a time when a bill before Congress, the "Immigration Innovation Act," would expand the H-1B visa program from 85,000 visas to more than 400,000 annually.
http://phys.org/...
Remember how three Iowa Supreme Court justices who spoke for equal marriage were recalled after a sleazy campaign by anti-gay fanatics? It turns out that appointed judges generally have better records because of their independence than those subject to the vagaries of popular whims:
State supreme court justices who don't face voters are generally more effective than their elected counterparts, according to research led by Princeton University political scientists. The research combines data about almost 6,000 state supreme court rulings nationwide between 1995 and 1998 with a new theoretical model to reach the conclusions that appointed justices generally bring a higher quality of information to the decision-making process, are more likely to change their preconceived opinions about a case, and are less likely to make errors than elected justices.
http://phys.org/...
Note we haven't gone into global climate change, pollution, macroeconomic analysis, female education, or any of a host of other subjects. These articles are a selection from just one day, from one science aggregation site.
Perhaps this is why the Texas Republican Party wants the State Board Of Education to suppress critical thinking:
In the you-can’t-make-up-this-stuff department, here’s what the Republican Party of Texas wrote into its 2012 platform as part of the section on education:
Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Those pesky inconvenient facts will get in the way of wingnut ideology.