I was recently reminded that I simply do not understand the emotional attachment that people had to Pluto as a planet. It's another dinky ball of ice in the Kuiper Belt! I don't want to get caught up in semantics, but we should at least lump it in with similar objects in terms of composition and formation.
But I have a serious question here: is the attachment to Pluto a symptom of bad science education in this country? Have we failed at conveying that science is a system of inquiry, and not just a list of facts?
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Friday, January 23, 2009
I give the reviews 5 stars!
There are few things online I find more delightful than the Amazon reviews for wacky products. I recently was pointed to the reviews for uranium, which include the classic line, "I would have given this product 5 stars for the teeth and the project on embracing diversity, but I deducted one star because of the giant mutant ants." Some of my other favorites include milk, a wedding chapel ("if you live anywhere but the mountains you will have to provide your own snow and trees"), and of course, the classic Badonkadonk Land Cruiser/Tank:
What are some other classic reviews out there?
Well, this has been a real mess for us. We had been shopping for a land cruiser/tank and after reading the reviews on Amazon, we decided on the JL421.
The problems started when we tried to take delivery. UPS left a note on the door and we arranged to be there the next day and they did not show up when they said that they would, so we ended up having to go to the UPS pickup office to get the Badonkadonk Land Cruiser/Tank.
This item will not fit in the trunk of a Corvette.
We ended up unpacking the JL421 there in the UPS parking lot and they were kind enough to dispose of the packing. I was pulled over twice on the way home because of not having tags and driving a vehicle that wasn't licensed for public roadways. We got off with warnings when we explained to the officers about our difficulties in getting the tank delivered to the house.
What are some other classic reviews out there?
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Will, Fully Obtuse
On the NY Times site yesterday, William Safire complained about a line in (President!) Obama's speech:
Safire is missing the point entirely here. It's not that Obama was looking for a nice turn of phrase here: he was saying that the choice is always rejected. Torture is always wrong. Etc. But Safire chose to see that line through a prism that is willing to sacrifice liberty in order to gain security, and we should all remember what Ben Franklin has to say about that.
(Full disclosure: I still have a grudge against Safire from the time he partially blamed the decline of marriage on "nubile women postponing weddings to pursue careers.")
He skirted the controversy about harsh interrogations with a facile “As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals” — when there are times when that painful choice cannot be “rejected.”
Safire is missing the point entirely here. It's not that Obama was looking for a nice turn of phrase here: he was saying that the choice is always rejected. Torture is always wrong. Etc. But Safire chose to see that line through a prism that is willing to sacrifice liberty in order to gain security, and we should all remember what Ben Franklin has to say about that.
(Full disclosure: I still have a grudge against Safire from the time he partially blamed the decline of marriage on "nubile women postponing weddings to pursue careers.")
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Comedy in a Post-Bush World
Just as 9/11 killed comedy, apparently so will the Obama administration. The NY Times interviewed a bunch of comedy writers on how they planned to cope with the apparent upcoming comedy drought. (Full disclosure: I would totally watch Letterman do household safety demonstrations.) I particularly liked the point made by an Onion editor:
Although, to be fair, there was an awful lot of mileage from the Bush malapropisms:
(Three more days!)
Too many people had one Bush-is-dumb joke and thought that made them the next Mark Twain. The arrival of a president fluent in English should raise the bar.
Although, to be fair, there was an awful lot of mileage from the Bush malapropisms:
(Three more days!)
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Tortured Logic
The NY Times recently posted a range of opinions on torture after the report of torture at Guantanamo. I disagreed with much of what Andrew McCarthy had to say (including his definition of what is and is not torture), but the logic of this particularly escapes me:
Why shouldn't coerced confessions be used in a trial? Besides the obvious reasons of them being biased, fruitless, and, of course, torture?
I would love to know McCarthy's precise reasoning for not wanting coerced confessions used in a trial. I cannot conceive of a reason that could disqualify them from trial proceedings and yet still yield useful intelligence. If you're going to destroy America's reputation by torturing prisoners, you should at least be able to back it up.
On that last score, even those of us who have argued that there is a place for enhanced interrogation techniques have insisted that those techniques should be limited to intelligence gathering in dire threat circumstances; they are not for gathering trial evidence. You can call a proceeding in which coerced confessions are used many things; one thing you can’t call it is a “trial.”
Why shouldn't coerced confessions be used in a trial? Besides the obvious reasons of them being biased, fruitless, and, of course, torture?
I would love to know McCarthy's precise reasoning for not wanting coerced confessions used in a trial. I cannot conceive of a reason that could disqualify them from trial proceedings and yet still yield useful intelligence. If you're going to destroy America's reputation by torturing prisoners, you should at least be able to back it up.
Monday, January 5, 2009
Senator Stuart Smalley!
It is with great glee that I note that Al Franken has officially won his senate race. Not only will C-SPAN2 be more entertaining, but this is the final bit of proof that we live in our own alternate universe. I think a switch got flipped back in 1998 or so, giving us, among other incongruities, Dubya instead of Jeb. (Also, in the alternate universe we elected a black guy named Barack Hussein Obama. Seriously! Look it up!)
I think I'm obsessed with alternate histories -- mostly from WWII to the present -- because I don't have a good feel for exactly how stable our society is. How could the past eight (or fifty) years been different, for better or for worse? Where is the tipping point where we slide into totalitarianism? What if 9/11 never happened? What if it was worse? What if Kerry won in 2004? What if Bush died, and Cheney had been president since 2002? I've inhaled Jo Walton's alternate histories, as well as some Philip Roth, and I cannot wait for people to start tackling Bush years.
Happy 2009 to you all. Let's make sure this alternate history doesn't get shelved under "dystopia".
I think I'm obsessed with alternate histories -- mostly from WWII to the present -- because I don't have a good feel for exactly how stable our society is. How could the past eight (or fifty) years been different, for better or for worse? Where is the tipping point where we slide into totalitarianism? What if 9/11 never happened? What if it was worse? What if Kerry won in 2004? What if Bush died, and Cheney had been president since 2002? I've inhaled Jo Walton's alternate histories, as well as some Philip Roth, and I cannot wait for people to start tackling Bush years.
Happy 2009 to you all. Let's make sure this alternate history doesn't get shelved under "dystopia".
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Unsustainable Lending (part II)
News has certainly slowed down at the end of the year (and the Bush administration has checked out entirely), but the Fed just announced that it will buy $500 billion in mortgage backed securities (MBS) by the middle of next year. There are a few obvious questions that I have: (a) isn't this what the TARP was supposed to do?; (b) are they just printing money to do this?; and (c) what is the risk we're taking on? Leaving these questions aside, I've been trying to look into what's in these. Is it simply that these distressed assets are severely undervalued, and it's purely an overcorrection in the (illiquid) MBS market? Or are we purchasing something more akin to Madoff "assets"? Again, as I reminded you in part I that I'm just a simple astrophysicist bumpkin...
The mortgage backed security (MBS) is the simplest of the fancy derivatives that have run rampant over the past few years, and the only one that I vaguely understand. (And I'm not sure that anybody really understood the credit default swap (CDS), let alone AIG). In an MBS, individual mortgages are bundled up and sold to investors. In theory, mortgages of borrowers of similar creditworthiness are bundled together, and although some small fraction of these might default, this will be built into the credit rating. In practice, I believe people played fast and loose with bundling these mortgages, especially non-traditional subprime and alt-a mortgages such as the option ARM. The MBS itself has value based on (a) the underlying assets, that is, the houses that were mortgaged, and (b) the interest paid by the borrowers. These MBSs may then sliced up some more, traded around, etc. None of this trading is done on an exchange, however, and thus these are illiquid assets. If you can't find anybody to buy the security, it's hard to tell what it's worth.
As house prices have declined, the values of MBSs have tanked. First, the value of the underlying assets has gone down. Second, with such thinly traded assets, if you need to sell in a down market the buyer has a distinct advantage. But a bigger problem is that the MBSs built on option ARM type mortgages are pretty much a complete sham. As I described in part I, the only way for a borrower with one of these loans to possibly afford it after the introductory teaser rate is to refinance or sell the house. And with prepayment penalties and negative amortization, house prices need to go up by at least 4% annually--without interruption-- for this to be possible.
Meanwhile, there's a wave of foreclosures that still hasn't fully crested. And massive foreclosures are devistating for neighborhoods, driving up blight and driving down prices even further in a painful cycle. In a half-assed attempt to arrest this in November, the Bush administration put together a "plan" to renegotiate some mortgages to keep people in their homes. Some other banks have also signed on voluntarily. For the owner of a mortgage, this can be a good deal: foreclosures are expensive, and houses are sold at fire-sale prices. If you can renegotiate and keep people in their houses, then everybody wins. (Or at least everybody loses a little, rather than everybody losing a lot.)
However, this plan did not help the large numbers of homeowners whose mortgages had been bundled up into MBSs. Instead, the bondholders flatly refuse to allow the mortgages to be renegotiated. This is a many-headed problem. Most notably, when your mortgage has been split up and is owned by thousands of investors, who do you talk to about renegotiating terms? But I think there's the additional unwillingness to fess up that renegotiating the underlying mortgages would show that the current distressed values of MBSs are actually the true values.
Again, there are two ways to calculate the value of the MBSs. The first is the underlying assets -- the houses -- and these have gone down in value, and are probably worth even less if you assume all of them are foreclosed on (of course a worst-case scenario). The second is the cash flow coming from the borrowers. On paper, this looks great: after the initial teaser rate, these borrowers will be paying out like gangbusters! 6%! 8%! Sounds fantastic! But in reality, the borrowers can only really afford that teaser rate. So any renegotiation of terms that will be affordable will end up either (a) fixing the interest rate at the teaser rate of 2% or (b) with a reasonable fixed rate of ~6%, by reducing the value of the mortgage by ~40%. Either way, the MBSs no longer appear to be such a hot deal, barring a sudden and unlikely reinflation of the housing bubble. (But you can't unscramble an egg.)
Right now it looks like the bondholders stonewalling on any renegotiation will work: they'll get bought out by the Fed, without having to admit that the securities are worth much less than they claim they are on paper. We'll all be stuck with the bill, and regular people will be kicked out of their houses. Of course, many of these people took out loans that appeared too good to be true...and were! Others were fleeced. And we all pay the price.
The mortgage backed security (MBS) is the simplest of the fancy derivatives that have run rampant over the past few years, and the only one that I vaguely understand. (And I'm not sure that anybody really understood the credit default swap (CDS), let alone AIG). In an MBS, individual mortgages are bundled up and sold to investors. In theory, mortgages of borrowers of similar creditworthiness are bundled together, and although some small fraction of these might default, this will be built into the credit rating. In practice, I believe people played fast and loose with bundling these mortgages, especially non-traditional subprime and alt-a mortgages such as the option ARM. The MBS itself has value based on (a) the underlying assets, that is, the houses that were mortgaged, and (b) the interest paid by the borrowers. These MBSs may then sliced up some more, traded around, etc. None of this trading is done on an exchange, however, and thus these are illiquid assets. If you can't find anybody to buy the security, it's hard to tell what it's worth.
As house prices have declined, the values of MBSs have tanked. First, the value of the underlying assets has gone down. Second, with such thinly traded assets, if you need to sell in a down market the buyer has a distinct advantage. But a bigger problem is that the MBSs built on option ARM type mortgages are pretty much a complete sham. As I described in part I, the only way for a borrower with one of these loans to possibly afford it after the introductory teaser rate is to refinance or sell the house. And with prepayment penalties and negative amortization, house prices need to go up by at least 4% annually--without interruption-- for this to be possible.
Meanwhile, there's a wave of foreclosures that still hasn't fully crested. And massive foreclosures are devistating for neighborhoods, driving up blight and driving down prices even further in a painful cycle. In a half-assed attempt to arrest this in November, the Bush administration put together a "plan" to renegotiate some mortgages to keep people in their homes. Some other banks have also signed on voluntarily. For the owner of a mortgage, this can be a good deal: foreclosures are expensive, and houses are sold at fire-sale prices. If you can renegotiate and keep people in their houses, then everybody wins. (Or at least everybody loses a little, rather than everybody losing a lot.)
However, this plan did not help the large numbers of homeowners whose mortgages had been bundled up into MBSs. Instead, the bondholders flatly refuse to allow the mortgages to be renegotiated. This is a many-headed problem. Most notably, when your mortgage has been split up and is owned by thousands of investors, who do you talk to about renegotiating terms? But I think there's the additional unwillingness to fess up that renegotiating the underlying mortgages would show that the current distressed values of MBSs are actually the true values.
Again, there are two ways to calculate the value of the MBSs. The first is the underlying assets -- the houses -- and these have gone down in value, and are probably worth even less if you assume all of them are foreclosed on (of course a worst-case scenario). The second is the cash flow coming from the borrowers. On paper, this looks great: after the initial teaser rate, these borrowers will be paying out like gangbusters! 6%! 8%! Sounds fantastic! But in reality, the borrowers can only really afford that teaser rate. So any renegotiation of terms that will be affordable will end up either (a) fixing the interest rate at the teaser rate of 2% or (b) with a reasonable fixed rate of ~6%, by reducing the value of the mortgage by ~40%. Either way, the MBSs no longer appear to be such a hot deal, barring a sudden and unlikely reinflation of the housing bubble. (But you can't unscramble an egg.)
Right now it looks like the bondholders stonewalling on any renegotiation will work: they'll get bought out by the Fed, without having to admit that the securities are worth much less than they claim they are on paper. We'll all be stuck with the bill, and regular people will be kicked out of their houses. Of course, many of these people took out loans that appeared too good to be true...and were! Others were fleeced. And we all pay the price.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Unsustainable Lending (part I)
I've been doing way too much reading about the mortgage crisis, and it's kind of depressing how we got ourselves into this mess. The numbers just don't add up...but I guess it never mattered for the people driving us into the ditch, since they get paid based on short-term results, long term be damned.
There are a couple issues that I've been musing about over the break, which I'll break into a couple of posts. The first has to do with prepayment penalties for subprime mortgages, and how they ensure that things were going to blow up even if house prices remained stable. The second (related) issue is why the institutions who own mortgage backed securities (MBS) don't support renegotiating underwater mortgages. Keep in mind that I'm just a humble astrophysicist, and I really don't know what I'm talking about when it comes to these issues.
The stereotypical subprime loan was an "option ARM" where there was a low introductory teaser rate (say, 2%) which lasted a year or so, followed by a reset where the rate would go up significantly (to 6-8%). Notably, the interest rate on the loan would usually reset before the payment rate, so the first year or so would have negative amortization, where the principle on the loan was actually increasing over time. For a modest $100,000 loan, the introductory payment rate would be $370/month, and after the first year or two, this would increase up to $740, or a factor of 2. Although I think I could afford this modest $100,000 loan, in general I don't think I could afford a doubling of my housing costs.
So what's a borrower to do? It seems obvious to me that the only option is to refinance the loan after the teaser rate expires (or sell the house). And this will only work if the price of the house hasn't decreased! But of course the lender doesn't want to see the borrower refinance every year or two to grab the 2% teaser rate over and over again. Other than the fat fees that are grabbed by the brokers, the main impediment to doing this is the prepayment penalty, which is typically 5% of the loan amount, which is $5000 for our $100,000 loan.
Some of this is laid out in this recent (Oct 2008) paper Did Prepayments Sustain the Subprime Market? [pdf] from the St. Louis Fed (mad props to them for using LaTeX!). As they point out for subprime mortgages over the past 5 years, after a reset "prohibitively high rates [leave] the borrower little option but to prepay either by selling or by refinancing," or end up delinquent and finally in foreclosure. As house prices turned around over the past couple years, these subprime borrowers could no long refinance, and were forced into foreclosure, and the authors conclude that "the boom in house prices...was largely responsible for sustaining the subprime mortgage market by allowing distressed borrowers to prepay mortgages."
What the authors don't seem to explicitly state is that because of prepayment penalties even if house prices plateaued, and didn't even decline, these people would be forced into foreclosure. By my back-of-the-envelope calculations, with a 5% prepayment penalty, if the rate resets 2 years after the start of the mortgage, the house price must have increased by at least 2.5% (before any broker fees!) to make a refinancing possible, because you need to pay back $105,000 on your $100,000 loan. It's even worse for the vast majority of subprime loans that start out with negative amortization. In those case, house prices must go up by at least 4-5% to make this all work.
And yes, by some magic, house prices have increased over the long term. But (a) price/rent ratios were so out of whack, it was clear we were in a bubble that couldn't last forever, and (b) even if we weren't in a bubble, there have always been short-term plateaus, declines, etc. But all it takes is one year of trying to pay over 50% of your income toward a mortgage and you'll find yourself broke and out of a house.
Stay tuned for part II...
There are a couple issues that I've been musing about over the break, which I'll break into a couple of posts. The first has to do with prepayment penalties for subprime mortgages, and how they ensure that things were going to blow up even if house prices remained stable. The second (related) issue is why the institutions who own mortgage backed securities (MBS) don't support renegotiating underwater mortgages. Keep in mind that I'm just a humble astrophysicist, and I really don't know what I'm talking about when it comes to these issues.
The stereotypical subprime loan was an "option ARM" where there was a low introductory teaser rate (say, 2%) which lasted a year or so, followed by a reset where the rate would go up significantly (to 6-8%). Notably, the interest rate on the loan would usually reset before the payment rate, so the first year or so would have negative amortization, where the principle on the loan was actually increasing over time. For a modest $100,000 loan, the introductory payment rate would be $370/month, and after the first year or two, this would increase up to $740, or a factor of 2. Although I think I could afford this modest $100,000 loan, in general I don't think I could afford a doubling of my housing costs.
So what's a borrower to do? It seems obvious to me that the only option is to refinance the loan after the teaser rate expires (or sell the house). And this will only work if the price of the house hasn't decreased! But of course the lender doesn't want to see the borrower refinance every year or two to grab the 2% teaser rate over and over again. Other than the fat fees that are grabbed by the brokers, the main impediment to doing this is the prepayment penalty, which is typically 5% of the loan amount, which is $5000 for our $100,000 loan.
Some of this is laid out in this recent (Oct 2008) paper Did Prepayments Sustain the Subprime Market? [pdf] from the St. Louis Fed (mad props to them for using LaTeX!). As they point out for subprime mortgages over the past 5 years, after a reset "prohibitively high rates [leave] the borrower little option but to prepay either by selling or by refinancing," or end up delinquent and finally in foreclosure. As house prices turned around over the past couple years, these subprime borrowers could no long refinance, and were forced into foreclosure, and the authors conclude that "the boom in house prices...was largely responsible for sustaining the subprime mortgage market by allowing distressed borrowers to prepay mortgages."
What the authors don't seem to explicitly state is that because of prepayment penalties even if house prices plateaued, and didn't even decline, these people would be forced into foreclosure. By my back-of-the-envelope calculations, with a 5% prepayment penalty, if the rate resets 2 years after the start of the mortgage, the house price must have increased by at least 2.5% (before any broker fees!) to make a refinancing possible, because you need to pay back $105,000 on your $100,000 loan. It's even worse for the vast majority of subprime loans that start out with negative amortization. In those case, house prices must go up by at least 4-5% to make this all work.
And yes, by some magic, house prices have increased over the long term. But (a) price/rent ratios were so out of whack, it was clear we were in a bubble that couldn't last forever, and (b) even if we weren't in a bubble, there have always been short-term plateaus, declines, etc. But all it takes is one year of trying to pay over 50% of your income toward a mortgage and you'll find yourself broke and out of a house.
Stay tuned for part II...
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Worst. Cookies. Ever.
Last week, Mark Bittman posted a new recipe for The Mother Of All Butter Cookies. His point was that this recipe was akin to a mother sauce and an easy and flexible base that could be turned into butterscotch cookies, chocolate chip cookies, citrus cookies... Sounds great, huh?
Some of you might ask: the Tollhouse Cookies are an all-time classic for a reason, how can you possible improve on them? Good question. I'd like the cookies to be a little more fluffy, but I'm not sure how to do this without using shortening, which I don't like.
There were a few things in the recipe that are certainly unusual, but conventional wisdom in cooking is not always right. First of all, the dough is mixed in a food processor. But this works well for pie dough. Second, it has a lot of cornstarch. Cornstarch? The reason Bittman gives is "to avoid overdeveloping gluten" and to add a "silken quality" to the cookies. Finally, it has unsalted butter, but only calls for a "pinch" of salt. Is that enough? On the other hand, it has a larger butter-to-flour ratio than the tollhouse cookies, and butter is good.
Well, the food processor appeared to work reasonably well; it was definitely cookie dough that came out (though my kitchenaid was standing there watching forlornly). But the cookies? The recipe suggests baking for 11 minutes at 375 F (and our oven is reasonably well calibrated). After 10 minutes, the bottoms were brown and the tops were uncooked. The chocolate chips weren't even melting. After a total of 15 or 16 minutes we just took them out. They were completely uncooked in the middle; the chocolate chips were barely warm; they had the texture and flavor of raw cornstarch; there was no flavor (possibly related to the lack of salt).
I wouldn't serve these cookies to my worst enemies. I put a comment on the Bitten blog, and it's still awaiting moderation. My guess is that the moderator is overwhelmed with people complaining that these are the
Worst. Cookies. Ever.
UPDATE: My comment has finally made it through moderation, along with a few more comments agreeing that these cookies suck.
Some of you might ask: the Tollhouse Cookies are an all-time classic for a reason, how can you possible improve on them? Good question. I'd like the cookies to be a little more fluffy, but I'm not sure how to do this without using shortening, which I don't like.
There were a few things in the recipe that are certainly unusual, but conventional wisdom in cooking is not always right. First of all, the dough is mixed in a food processor. But this works well for pie dough. Second, it has a lot of cornstarch. Cornstarch? The reason Bittman gives is "to avoid overdeveloping gluten" and to add a "silken quality" to the cookies. Finally, it has unsalted butter, but only calls for a "pinch" of salt. Is that enough? On the other hand, it has a larger butter-to-flour ratio than the tollhouse cookies, and butter is good.
Well, the food processor appeared to work reasonably well; it was definitely cookie dough that came out (though my kitchenaid was standing there watching forlornly). But the cookies? The recipe suggests baking for 11 minutes at 375 F (and our oven is reasonably well calibrated). After 10 minutes, the bottoms were brown and the tops were uncooked. The chocolate chips weren't even melting. After a total of 15 or 16 minutes we just took them out. They were completely uncooked in the middle; the chocolate chips were barely warm; they had the texture and flavor of raw cornstarch; there was no flavor (possibly related to the lack of salt).
I wouldn't serve these cookies to my worst enemies. I put a comment on the Bitten blog, and it's still awaiting moderation. My guess is that the moderator is overwhelmed with people complaining that these are the
Worst. Cookies. Ever.
UPDATE: My comment has finally made it through moderation, along with a few more comments agreeing that these cookies suck.
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Does the religious right also not get that the Colbert Report is a parody?
Even if you didn't watch Tuesday's Daily Show, you probably saw the second half of Jon Stewart's interview with Mike Huckabee linked on one of the million liberal blogs out there. I was curious as to what the conservative blogs were saying, though. What did they think of Huckabee's performance? Or about Stewart's line, "Religion is far more of a choice than homosexuality."?
I googled "jon stewart" "mike huckabee" and scrolled through eight pages of links to blog posts on the interview. Not a single one of those blogs was a conservative blog. So what's the deal? Was no one happy with Huckabee's performance? Is Mike Huckabee just not on the conservative radar right now? Or is The Daily Show itself not on the conservative radar? Among the religious right, Newt Gingrich, Ralph Reed, and Bill Bennett* have all been on the show multiple times. So they're not ignoring the show.
However, there are no results when searching for mentions of the Daily Show on the websites of the AFA, Focus on the Family, the FRC, or the Concerned Women for America. These are groups that send out weekly alerts on the latest "pro-homosexual" and "anti-Christian" content in pop culture. I wasn't expecting them all to have found something to be offended by in the program, but I thought at least one of them might have mentioned the show in the past ten years. It's not like basic cable is beneath their notice.
I'm just surprised that a show that is a staple of the left's culture, and that has been a steadfast supporter of gay marriage for years, has been completely ignored by the religious right. Is the religious right really unaware of the influence of the Daily Show? Or am I the one who's missing something?
* That two-part interview with Bill Bennett might be my favorite Daily Show moment ever. What? Like you don't all have similar mental lists.
I googled "jon stewart" "mike huckabee" and scrolled through eight pages of links to blog posts on the interview. Not a single one of those blogs was a conservative blog. So what's the deal? Was no one happy with Huckabee's performance? Is Mike Huckabee just not on the conservative radar right now? Or is The Daily Show itself not on the conservative radar? Among the religious right, Newt Gingrich, Ralph Reed, and Bill Bennett* have all been on the show multiple times. So they're not ignoring the show.
However, there are no results when searching for mentions of the Daily Show on the websites of the AFA, Focus on the Family, the FRC, or the Concerned Women for America. These are groups that send out weekly alerts on the latest "pro-homosexual" and "anti-Christian" content in pop culture. I wasn't expecting them all to have found something to be offended by in the program, but I thought at least one of them might have mentioned the show in the past ten years. It's not like basic cable is beneath their notice.
I'm just surprised that a show that is a staple of the left's culture, and that has been a steadfast supporter of gay marriage for years, has been completely ignored by the religious right. Is the religious right really unaware of the influence of the Daily Show? Or am I the one who's missing something?
* That two-part interview with Bill Bennett might be my favorite Daily Show moment ever. What? Like you don't all have similar mental lists.
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