Akkam's Razor TL;DR.

All excerpts are quoted from the respective link(s).

• Op-Ed Columnist – The Wizard of Beck – NYTimes.com – They pay more attention to Rush’s imaginary millions than to the real voters down the street. The Republican Party is unpopular because it’s more interested in pleasing Rush’s ghosts than actual people. The party is leaderless right now because nobody has the guts to step outside the rigid parameters enforced by the radio jocks and create a new party identity. The party is losing because it has adopted a radio entertainer’s niche-building strategy, while abandoning the politician’s coalition-building strategy.
• Newsy: The News Is Broken, But We Can Fix It | Epicenter | Wired.com – “The media is losing credibility in peoples’ minds, and one of the reasons [for that] is this myth that people are only interested in hearing their version of the story,” Spencer told Wired.com. “[Newsy.com is] interested in hitting what I consider to be the larger percentage of the population, who understand that we live in a global marketplace…. The person who is paying attention to [the news] on a global basis and is paying attention to multiple sources and multiple perspectives will probably have a competitive advantage over the person who isn’t.”
• Judging A Book By Its Cover: An Artistic Analysis Of Going Rogue – Going rogue – Jezebel – The composition of Going Rogue immediately brings to mind photographs of another famous maverick: Amelia Earhart. Earhart is frequently shown framed against a vast expanse of blue sky, hair tousled by the wind. Palin, too, stands against a background of nothing but clouds and sky, staring gamely at something far away, something above the viewer, that only she can see (Russia, perhaps?). Palin is the entire foreground-we see nothing but her brave figure silhouetted against the open Alaska sky. The aviation symbolism is clear: Palin is ready to take flight. Tired of being hemmed in by lame-duck governorship and the twistings and turnings of the liberal media, Palin is ready to fly off on her own, forge her own path into the future.
• Where religious belief and disbelief meet in the brain – In the first neuroimaging study to systematically compare religious faith with ordinary cognition, UCLA and University of Southern California researchers have found that while the human brain responds very differently to religious and nonreligious propositions, the process of believing or disbelieving a statement, whether religious or not, seems to be governed by the same areas in the brain.
• Why Dumb Toys Make Kids Smarter – The Daily Beast – While we weren’t aware of the neuroscience, it was plainly obvious: Pokemon cards were making our son’s brain really fast at elementary-school math. I began to buy him cards. Lots of cards.
• The 15 Ugliest Cars Ever Made – We’ve all been there. A night that went just a bit too long, a bit too much to drink, that person making eyes at you across the bar. And the next morning, as your head pounds and your stomach churns, you notice that the hot body you were making it with is a little more “mutant seamonster” than you remember he/she to be. These cars are the automotive equivalent of that “uh-oh” moment. Cars so ugly their makers must have surely hung their heads in shame. If you have a strong stomach, read on.
• Post-Recession Employment Arithmetic | The Big Picture – The “Harsh Arithmetic of the Employment Deficit” means that we will not likely return to 2007 employment levels until (ugh) 2017.