Actor Colin Firth is credited as an author in a new study on the brain and politics. The Academy Award winner appeared as guest editor of Britain’s Today show and asked scientist Geraint Rees, from University College London’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, to scan the brains of politicians from Britain’s two leading political parties, Labour and Conservative, to see if there were differences.

With increasing and annoying frequency, I’m seeing lazy pieces like this.

The demands of financial capital are bashing the brains out of the US economy, with the assistance of the Zombie Party.

Our relationship to readers reading in our presence is awkward. The reader is mysterious. She sends few physical cues of the sort we search for, consciously and unconsciously, in others. We abhor a lack of information about those in our midst, so we fill in the blanks. Seeing a reader alone in a restaurant, for instance, some no doubt think, “The poor soul must be lonely.” The reader, though, has ten thousand friends.

If I’d been asleep for the last decade and woke up to ABC This Week’s interview of Presidential economic advisor Austan Goolgbee, I would assume that Mitt Romney won the 2008 election, that he was predictably following Republican dogma about how to recover from a severe financial collapse and recession and that media folks like Christiane Amanpour were realizing those standard GOP policies aren’t working.

So in January, Obama basically said, “This is unconstitutional so don’t make it any worse or I’ll get cross,” and this amendment, which effectively sustains the status quo but doesn’t make it worse, gets pretty much the same response from the Administration.

I’m surprised that my post, “Bribes Work: How Peterson, the Enemy of Social Security, Bought the Roosevelt Name” has created a bit of a firestorm within what passes for the left wing political blogosphere. It has elicited responses from Andy Rich of the Roosevelt Institute, Roosevelt Institute fellow Mike Konczal, as well as two groups only mentioned in passing in the piece, the Economic Policy Institute and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Good Morning! Isn’t that tree swallow a cutie?

Blind Allegiance to Sarah Palin‘s the FDL Book Salon selection for today (5pm ET), with Mudflats and Shannyn Moore. Lisa Derrick offers up Save the Farm, revisiting the eviction of growers from LA’s South Central Farm, Monday at 8pm ET. Please join us.

Oh, and nyceve and McJoan will be Virtually Speaking tonight, 9pm ET.

Now, behold the talking heads! (if Chris Wallace doesn’t call out Palin on her most ignorant revision of Paul Revere’s ride, why I’ll . . .)

Pixie Picnic. This Walter Lanz Productions cartoon was released on Sept. 23, 1948.

Gays get married, and suddenly you have toddlers getting felt up by their uncles as they pilot their Hummers though Heartland America. Also these toddlers are high on crack. And drunk. And gay.