The American Beast: Essays, 2012-2022 | 
The entire budget of the National Archives is about the cost of a single C-17 military transport plane. In 2018, when Trump nominated Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, the National Archives... processed twenty thousand pages of documents relating to.... the Clinton administration but was unable to get through all the requested documents from his work in the Bush administration in time for the Senate to review them.
Half of the people believe that they know how the other half lives, and deem them enemies.
In its modern usage, innovation is the idea of progress jammed into a criticism-proof jack-in-the-box...
(Nodding so much am giving myself neckache.)
As these and other critics have demonstrated again and again, a sizable number of people polled either know nothing about the matters those polls purport to measure or hold no opinion about them. "The first question a pollster should ask," the sociologist Leo Bogart advised in 1972, is "'Have you thought about this at all? Do you have an opinion?"
Ballots were often printed in newspapers: you'd cut one out and bring it with you. With the turn to the secret ballot, beginning in the 1880s, the government began supplying the ballots, but newspapers kept printing them:; they'd use them to conduct their own polls, called "straw polls." Before the election, you'd cut out your ballot and mail it to the newspaper, which would make a prediction.
#learning
NO ONE SERIOUSLY QUESTIONS that members of Congress are more polarized than they used to be. This is borne out anecdotally, as social scientists like to say, by watching them on cable television, where you can see the spittle in HD...
According to the constitutional law scholar Carl Bogus, at least sixteen of the twenty-seven law review articles published between 1970 and 1989 that were favorable to the NRA's interpretation of the Second Amendment were "written by lawyers who had been directly employed by or represented the NRA or other gun rights organizations."
