A social-media analysis finds Mitt Romney Facebook fans also liking guns, gardening, Walmart and movies like 17 Miracles and The Hangover. Barack Obama fans like camping, meditation, Samsung Mobile and they also apparently like The Hangover.---

Top of the Alty World

“How to Tell if Someone is a Republican or Democrat Without Asking”—VentureBeat.

The Jackson Free Press surveys recent voter ID laws passed around the country and the legal battles that have followed. –Jackson Free Press

Democracy Now! hosts union leaders, teachers and parents to talk about Chicago’s historic public school teacher’s strike.—Democracy Now!

Top of Alty Utah

In a bizarre court settlement, the Utah Attorney General’s Office resolved its legal battle with bar owners by allowing for drink specials to be served again in Utah bars, while a lawmaker questions if that settlement were even legal or not.—Salt Lake City Weekly

The documentary Bully will be shown to more than 12,000 Utah students as part of a campaign to raise awareness about bullying.—Q Salt Lake.

KRCL hosts Brenda Price, who is fighting ovarian cancer and helping raise awareness about early detection efforts with the help of the HERA Foundation.—RadioActive

Rantosphere

Truthout's William Rivers Pitt derides the Democratic and Republican National Conventions as pure political theater.

“American politics is a whorehouse. Anyone trying to make the argument that Democrats are different from Republicans these days has a hard row to hoe. To be sure, the GOP has been overtaken by Taliban Christians who hate women across the board, and there aren't any Democrats trying to limit access to the voting booth in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas or Florida ... but when it comes to the money, to the powers behind the throne, to the “Too Big To Fail" entities standing above reproach in the halls of power, both parties bend the knee, to our collective detriment, and that is fact.”—Truthout

The Long View

Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Katherine Boo discusses how to report on poverty, after a three-year project reporting on the efforts of people in an Indian slum trying to break out of poverty.

“As a reporter, you know the tropes of how stories on poverty work in any country. A reporter will go to an NGO and say, “Tell me about the good work that you’re doing and introduce me to the poor people who represent the kind of help you give.” It serves to streamline the storytelling, but it gives you a lopsided cosmos in which almost every poor person you read about is involved with a NGO helping him. Our understanding of poverty and how people escape from poverty, in any country, is quite distorted.”—Guernica Magazine