What Does Palin Really Think of Obama?

For those of you haven’t heard yet, a new book is coming out Monday called Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction. Written by David Kuo, who was a well-placed person in the Office of Faith Based initiatives, it details how the Bush administration used faith to further a political agenda. Via Street Prophets, I found this interview hosted on Crooks and Liars. To me the most pertinent passage is: One official who rated grant applications told Kuo, “ when I saw one of those non-Christian groups in the set I was reviewing, I just stopped looking at them…

How Blue America Subsidizes Red America. A very neat Aaron Carroll chart shows that, on average, conservative states feature more "dependency" on federal programs than do liberal ones. You can slice this kind of data in a variety of ways, but you always end up with the same aggregate pattern. It happens to be the case that the richest parts of the United States (think the San Francisco Bay area or Connecticut) favor Democrats and also that conservative areas of the country are overrepresented in the Senate. Transfers, on average, flow away from high-income and underrepresented areas and toward low-income…