HA HA HA HA!!!! At last! Quantitative evidence! According to a recent study directed by Professor Gary King, Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University:
And the biggest taunters are the ones in the safest districts - they don't HAVE to play nice, so they don't. Kinda like a ... hmm... what's the word? Oh right - kinda like a bully!"[M]odern members of Congress spend about 27 percent of the time just taunting each other.
“It’s jarring and surprising,” said Prof. Gary King, an expert in using computers to find patterns in large amounts of data. And, King said, probably counterproductive if we want Congress’s members to trust one another enough to make deals.
“The entire government may go bankrupt, I guess. This week, right?” King said in a telephone interview. “We probably want our representatives to be listening to each other rather than calling each other names.”
To come up with this insight, King and two graduate students analyzed 64,033 press releases sent out by all U.S. senators from 2005 to 2007."
It's all fun and games until the government grinds to a halt, further threatening the not-really-recovering global economy...
