So I understand the Republicans are going to hold their convention underwater next year. Or at least the banner for the convention says "Tampa Bay" on it, as opposed to the city known as Tampa. (The Tampa Bay Buccaneers were named so as to include St. Petersburg, on the other side of the bay, in the fan base. But the convention is a one-time event, and it's supposed to be about the whole country.)

I wish they would hold their convention "underwater", so maybe they'd find out how people feel about their mortgages.

During his interview with Pat Buchanan, Thom should have brought up the research of Dr.Claude Steele, who discovered how the stereotype threat negatively affects student testing. In WHISTLING VIVALDI, Claude Steele shares the experiments and studies that show, again and again, that exposing subjects to stereotypes—merely reminding a group of female math majors about to take a math test, for example, that women are considered naturally inferior to men at math. Likewise, African-American testers achieve lower scores when faced with a "stereotype threat" and score higher when there is no stereotype threat, i.e. the test subjects believe they are capable of scoring as high as any other group. Also, schools like The Children's Zone in N.Y. have taken black children who were failing in other schools and developed them into top achievers. How is that possible if the children's abilities are supposedly limited, according to test scores?