When someone made the banal observation that changing views via rational persuasion rarely happens, there was much clucking of blogospheric tongues.  And then along comes this:

According to Lakoff, Democrats have been wrong to assume that people are rational actors who make their decisions based on facts; in reality, he says, cognitive science has proved that all of us are programmed to respond to the frames that have been embedded deep in our unconscious minds, and if the facts don’t fit the frame, our brains simply reject them. Lakoff explained to me that the frames in our brains can be ”activated” by the right combination of words and imagery, and only then, once the brain has been unlocked, can we process the facts being thrown at us.

I confess to being agnostic about Lakoff’s claims about what "cognitive science has proved."