Most scientists identify as Democrats (55 percent), while 32 percent identify as independents and just 6 percent say they are Republicans.
— Pew Research, July 2009

Reality conception doesn’t require the brains of a rocket scientist, but one does need some kind of brain, and maybe a brain that’s not so flat.
Take Mitt Romney (please!), who carries an impressive foreign policy brain trust, but still lacks walking-around sense.

“Romney’s team is almost too broad, it’s soulless,” worried one GOP foreign policy expert who has informally advised the Romney campaign.
“You don’t know what direction he would go and some conservatives are worried it could be analysis paralysis.”

Before any paralysis, there’s gotta be some emotional feelings.

(Illustration found here).

A couple of weeks ago, Herman Cain blew off an interview with the Manchester (New Hampshire) Union Leader due to the fact the talk would also be on video — a real bad piece of equipment for Cain after the Libya incident — and his campaign had installed a new rule: No video cameras in newspaper interviews.
And why? Because “videos are typically used for television, and it’s a newspaper.”
The  Union Leader responded in a blistering editorial, the final graph the kicker:

Videos these days are used by everyone, even random people on the street who record candidates with their cell phones.
The difference between television and newspaper interviews is not that cameras are present, but that newspaper interviews tend to be longer and more in depth.
The Cain campaign knows this.
It seems that Cain is fine with everyone seeing him give short, prepared answers, but not with everyone seeing him try to answer questions in which he has more than 30 or 60 seconds to respond.
He would do well to rethink that decision, for it gives the impression that he’s got something to hide.

No shit, sherlock.
Herman has a major, and disgusting, problem with women.

However, the much, way-much-bigger problem is that US politics sucks through a small straw.

Nearly 70 percent of US peoples consider the current Congressional operation the worse in 60 years — a “do-nothing Congress,” as scripted by Harry Truman in 1948 (via CNN).
The failure of the so-called “Super Committee” is a case in point — a do nothing due to the (t)he nastiness of the proposed cuts and the huge, huge ass-holeness of the GOP.

A most-excellent post yesterday at The Bonddad Blog reported the US could get going again if a lot of shit is put aside, with an emphasis on putting people back to work, pointedly on this country’s embarassing infrastructure.
The problem? Too much bullshit:

So what’s the problem?
Why is our system so fundamentally stuck?
Partly it’s a colossal, bipartisan lack of the political courage required to tell people what they sort of know but don’t want to hear.
Partly it’s a Republican Party that, for its own cynical reasons, wants no deal with this president. Partly it’s moneyed, focused lobbies that swarm in defense of specific advantages written into the law; there is no comparable lobby for compromise, let alone sacrifice.
…
The point to the above two paragraphs is simple: our political system is beyond broken and dysfunctional. I’m not quite sure where that is, but I do know it’s really bad place to be.
And that is why watching the train-wreck that is the daily news is so frustrating: solving the problem is easy, but our political system has become so dysfunctional as to prevent that from happening.

Brains infested with dry rot won’t work — the US is in a world of hurt.