Modern Republican party

Great post from Joe Klein.  I’ll just excerpt some highlights:

Now we have this craziness. The Republican party has rejected all of the polices mentioned above, except for financial deregulation. It has gone off the deep end on taxes. It has denied the long-term economic and societal benefits of universal health insurance. It has gone into climate change denial…it is hard for any card-carrying Republican to say: I believe that Darwinian evolution is God’s plan. These sad realities probably led to Haley Barbour’s decision not to run for President and may well lead to the same decision for Indiana’s Mitch Daniels. They have led Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty to make mortal fools of themselves.

A hundred years from now, historians will be having a field day: How did the Republicans go so far astray? Why did it work, from time to time, electorally? Why weren’t the Democrats more effective in stopping them? Why didn’t the society’s major conservative economic stakeholders (outside the uber-reactionary Oil Patch) renounce the sideshow and demand a more reasonable brand of conservatism?…

For most of the 40 years that I’ve been a working reporter, the country chugged along pretty damned well. There were plenty of important issues, but none that threatened the essence of our American miracle. That’s no longer true. We face a future dominated by the celebration of ignorance and sloppy short-term thinking. I think those of us who are trying to actually report the world as it is–flawed and mistaken as we sometimes are–are facing a great challenge right now. We really owe the public a good, smart, rigorous couple of years between now and election day, 2012.

Good stuff.  I’ve also linked here an awesome Lawrence O’Donnell takedown of Rush that Klein has on the page:

Fair and Balanced

Via Drum:

Will the birthers double down?

Okay, first, I don want to mention what a sad commentary on our country that the release of the long-form of Obama’s birth certificate is dominating the news today.  The fact that the lunatic fringe (I guess the real problem is, though, that this isn’t exactly a “fringe” among Republicans)  is able to set the agenda is plenty disturbing.  There seems to be some sense of “okay, the birthers can give up now.”  But I really doubt they will.  This really reminded me of a classic story of cognitive dissonance.  In When Prophecy Fails (nice summary at Wikipedia), Leon Festinger tells the story of a cult that believed a flying saucer was going to rescue them from the end of the world.  When that didn’t happen (obviously), many of the cult members became even more pronounced in their crazy beliefs.  I think my lovely wife’s comment on the last post, pretty much sums up what will surely be the response for many:

Sadly, at least one of my facebook friends has already said “a man in his position could forge anything” (can’t delete the “friend” as we are related).

It will be interesting to see what happens with the “birther” movement from here on.  Every reason to believe they go further down the rabbit hole.  And I am quite curious to find out from my wife which family member this is.

Clearly a forgery!

Sex surveys: when computers are better than humans

So, the latest results from a survey of American sexual practices.  Nothing all that surprising here.  What caught my attention from the graphs is that if you are going to engage in a sexual practice, there’s a damn good chance you are going to start doing so before the age of 30 (take home:  if your sexual partner over 30 hasn’t done it already, just give up?):

What really interested me, though, was the survey methodology:

It is not easy to ask people about their sex lives, and getting honest answers may be even harder. But there are ways to do it. One good method is to have a computer ask the questions, while the interviewee listens through earphones and enters the answers on the screen — without the intervention, or even the presence, of another human.

Last month the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published areport on sexual behavior that used this technique with laptops to gather data on Americans’ sexual behavior, attraction and identity by age, marital status, education and race. Anjani Chandra, the lead author, said the process was developed to assure total anonymity for the respondents.

Dr. Chandra, a demographer with the agency, explained: “The computer tells the interviewees what key to press to lock away the responses. When they return the laptop to the interviewers, they can’t get in. It’s transmitted to a central place where the data processing happens without names or addresses. We get a file that can’t be linked back to the person.”

When it comes to getting sensitive information from survey respondents, there’s good evidence that you are better off interviewing them with a computer than a human.  From a political science perspective, I’m not sure you’d want to go to this extreme (sounds expensive for one), but certainly when measuring attitudes such as racism, sexism, etc., something along these lines seems much more likely to get accurate answers.   It’s one thing to admit to another human you don’t like Obama because he is Black– probably easier to admit to a computer.

They’re on to me

Via Crooked Timber:

My new diet: hang out with skinny people

Not that I want to lose a lot of weight, but I’d like to get down 10 pounds or so.  I’ve got from 2 slices of pizza at lunch to 1.  No effect.  I gave up candy (and I eat a lot) for Lent.  No effect.  Last summer I tried running four days a week instead of three.  No effect.  Wrong strategies all.  I’m going to just start hanging out more with skinny people.  Via Jonah Lehrer:

A few years ago, Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler made a striking discovery about obesity: it spreads from person to person, much like a contagious virus…

But this longitudinal data – it’s a bird’s eye view of human life – still begs the question: How do other people influence us? Why does an obese friend make us so much more likely to gain weight? Why do the habits of others influence our own habits?

A brand new paper by researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder helps answer these important questions.

Love these experiments:

In one of their experiments, researchers asked random strangers walking through a lobby at the University if they would take a quick survey. The surveys had photos of an overweight person, a person of normal weight or a lamp. After completing the survey, the researchers asked the subjects to help themselves from a bowl of candy. Those who were exposed to the picture of the overweight individual took, on average, 3o percent more candies than those exposed to the control pictures.

In a second study, subjects were invited to do a cookie taste test. Those who were first exposed to pictures of overweight individuals ate twice as many cookies as those were exposed to images of trees, fishbowls and non-overweight subjects. This effect held when participants said they had a goal to maintain a healthy weight. As the researchers write, “Exposure to a negative stereotype [seeing someone who is overweight] can lead to stereotype conducive behavior.” Even when we are determined to maintain our diet, we are still subtly undermined by the choices and habits of everyone else.

Wow.  And, of course further evidence that we’re not half as much in control of our lives as we think we are.

What is it with those white Mississippians?

Why are they so much more racist than even the rest of the South?  Does this have anything to do with the fact that 90% of White Mississippians voted for McCain?  Anyway, before I linked to a PPP poll on MS Republicans and gay marriage.

PPP has now asked the same question of Republicans (and all voters) in Georgia and NC.  The comparison makes Mississippi look even worse (this is actually gleaned from a post about views on the Civil War):

A few weeks ago we released numbers showing that a plurality of Republicans in Mississippi think interracial marriage should be illegal. Democrats there think it should be legal by a 68/18 margin and independents do so 56/21, making the overall numbers in the state 54% who think it should be legal to 28% who believe it should be illegal.

GOP voters in North Carolina and Georgia don’t have the same hang up about interracial marriage that their peers in Mississippi do. In Georgia Republicans think it should be legal by a 52/29 spread. Democrats do so 67/20 and independents do 74/13, making the overall numbers 62/22. And in North Carolina Republicans think it should be legal by a 55/30 spread. Democrats do so 74/15 and independents do 80/11, making the the overall numbers 68/20.

I usually pick on Alabama or Mississippi in my classes when I discuss downsides of federalism, I think I’ll stick exclusively with Mississippi now.

Where all my free time has gone lately

Ipad version:

Daniels for President?

Interesting profile of Indiana Governor and potential Republican presidential candidate Mitch Daniels in the Post yesterday.   Daniels basically seems to be the favorite Republican among policy wonks of all stripes as he A) seems to take policy seriously; and B) ummm, I think that’s about it, but sadly “A” is in very short supply among Republican Presidential wannabes.  That said, seems to me his policy ideas are not much better than Paul Ryan’s, he’s just smarter, better informed, and really has the rhetoric down in a way that impresses across the political spectrum.  Nonetheless, I just don’t see this guy winning the Republican nomination this year because there’s no way a guy this sober-minded wins the nomination in an era when more than half of Republicans can’t even except that Obama was born in America.  And that number is surely much higher among Republican primary voters.   Does this sound like the description of someone who can win over the Republican base in 2012?

But Daniels also would challenge his own party, with a message that calls for focusing on fiscal issues over social ones, for appealing seriously to voters who are not part of the conservative coalition and for being prepared to compromise with Democrats to solve the debt problem.

Sounds like someone who has the best shot in a general election, of course, but the base has no interest in someone who can actually appeal to independents.  Or how about this:

Daniels’s potential supporters see him as the anti-Obama, a 5-foot-7-inch, motorcycle-riding, balding politician who lacks the charisma Obama displayed during his 2008 campaign but who they believe has the intellectual heft and plainspoken appeal to go toe-to-toe with the president.

Really?  Short, bald, and lacking in charisma as somehow a political positive.  There’s spin and there’s spin.  Wait, there’s more:

In a field with many candidates who carry baggage, Daniels’s biggest burdens might be how he would run. Although he is solidly antiabortion, he has called for a truce on social issues to keep the focus on the country’s fiscal problems. That has riled social and religious conservatives and is already drawing criticism from potential rivals.

Seriously, among Republicans he would certainly be my choice to be president, but I think that in itself is pretty telling.  Tell me how this guy is supposed to win the Republican nomination given the current state of the Republican party and their activists?

Barbour

Really like Nate Silver’s take on why Haley Barbour is not running for president.  Very nice use of polling data in appropriate context.  Just read it.

Mike Barr should have a blog

Two really smart comments from über-reader, Mike Barr, on recent posts.  Then again, I suppose any comment which agrees with my overall point is smart .  Actually, what I really like is the additional issues and perspectives Mike raises.  First, on school integration:

I agree with that article. But I would have added that class values and identity are more important than race. I can report first hand that poor white kids do as much to pull down their academically ambitious peers as block kids do their own. I went 4 schools in vastly different circumstances* before I went to my 5th school in 10th grade. When the children with higher levels of academic aspirations (i.e., college, or in an honors course) are in the minority they are often ostracized, belittled, and in the worst case, told they are ‘sell outs’ to their own group, whether that is a racial or class identity.

In short, I believe that the “crabs in a barrel” metaphor is stronger and more firmly rooted in groups that are under economic threat, and would vary within a group over time as economic uncertainty fluctuates. And the stronger the group identify the stronger the crabs in a barrel mentality. I would add that this dynamic is probably even stronger among groups where the identity is partly defined by a contrast to a more powerful or economically successful out-group (e.g., “red necks” vs well, city slickers?, the town vs. gown groups, black and white, and localized distinctions such as the East Bank vs. West bank identities in New Orleans that is probably replicated in many other places).

The point of this is that if academics would obsess less about race and more about class values and group identities they might discover generalities and patterns that would be interesting academically, but might give rise to policies that are more likely to work.

Excellent point.  What I so liked about the Wake County policy is that is was class-based, not race-based.  As I said to my students the other day, the problem with Duke is that many of the Black kids there were  the children of doctors and lawyers– just like the white kids.  Obviously, you cannot take race out of the equation in American society, but nor should you ignore the issue of class (i.e., economic status).

And, Mike on how we gender socialize our children:

Thank goodness we have 2 boys. However, the hypersexualization in today’s culture is damaging to boys and girls. My opinion is that boys are being socialized into a hyper-macho culture that emphasizes sexual conquest and defense of honor signs of maturity and masculinity while denigrating academic and artistic pursuits. The pressure on girls is to be sexy. In short, boys are pressured to gain respect by fighting over every perceived slight and conquering as many women as possible, while girls are supposed to be sex objects.

Yep.  I credit Mike’s astute observations to his graduate education at Ohio State.  And, if he doesn’t start his own blog, he should write some guest posts for me.