The mid-term elections in the USA
It looks like I was about right in regards to the House, and perhaps even mildly too pessimistic about Republican prospects. In relation to the Senate I was off. It is likely that there’ll be 53 Democrats (the late returns from the two states where Dems are leading come from liberal precincts) and de facto […]
Election 2010 Predictions
For Congress, I think that the breakdown will be:
Senate – 50 Republicans, 50 Democrats
House – 240 Republicans, 195 Democrats
My reasoning? I just took FiveThirtyEight’s numbers and shaded them a bit to the Republican side. There’s no point in making predictions unless you predict something novel and a bit off expectations. Additionally, since the readership here […]
Swedes are not sexist or nativist
A party, the Sweden Democrats, is about to enter the Swedish parliamanent which is described in this way in Wikipedia:
The party has its origins in the nationalist movement Bevara Sverige Svenskt (”Keep Sweden Swedish”)…During the mid 1990s, the party leader Mikael Jansson strove to make the party more respectable, modelling it after other “euronationalist” parties, […]
The child is the father of the man
Prenatal undernutrition and cognitive function in late adulthood:
At the end of World War II, a severe 5-mo famine struck the cities in the western part of The Netherlands. At its peak, the rations dropped to as low as 400 calories per day. In 1972, cognitive performance in 19-y-old male conscripts was reported not to have […]
How much more racist are white conservatives than white liberals?
A few weeks ago there were a bunch of stories on how white the audience was at Glenn Beck’s rally. That’s empirically true, and the Tea Party movement as a whole is overwhelmingly white. So is the American conservative movement. This in a nation which is ~65% white in a colloquial sense (i.e., white Hispanics […]
Republicans, the middle class party
In my post below I refuted the contention that the Democrats are the party of the rich. As I noted there is some evidence that the super-rich may tilt Democrat. There are some economic and social sectors which lean Democratic because of their social liberalism, but there is no preponderance that I have seen in […]
Republicans still the party of the rich
I notice that Roger L. Simon has an uninformed post up, The Party of the Rich, where he says:
Back when I was a kid, we used to assume the Republicans were the party of the rich. It was a given — all those plutocrats with chauffeurs shuttling them between the penthouse in Sutton Place and […]
Do liberals and conservatives know what they are?
Matthew Yglesias says:
I only wish the same level of scrutiny were applied to assertions about whether the public is “liberal” or “conservative” where I believe there’s strong circumstantial evidence that many people just don’t understand these terms in the way political and media professionals understand them. For example, when you break these things out by […]
Rand Paul
A moderately sympathetic story about Rand Paul, who is running as the anti-establishment candidate in Kentucky. My bias, such that I have, is to look positively upon Paul’s run for Senate, mostly because I know that when I agree with a Paul they’ll actually stick to the stance they’re taking because they actually believe […]
The rise of the irreligious Left, the reemergence of Republican religious neutrality (?)
Over at ScienceBlogs I have a post up where I explore the differences by state between the American Religious Identification Survey in 1990 and 2008. I then compare these data to the national election results in 1988 and 2008.
Here is a chart which shows the relationship between % “No Religion” and proportion of votes for […]
What era are our intuitions about elites and business adapted to?
Well, just the way I asked it, our gut feelings about the economically powerful are obviously not a product of hunter-gatherer life, given that such societies have minimal hierarchy, and so minimal disparities in power, material wealth, privileges of a…
Hitler reacts to Scott Brown’s victory
H/T Ezra Klein
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On signals & design
Somehow SR’s email address was added to Newsmax’s mailing list for ad buys. The pitch is that one will reach affluent readers. But they undermine their message by formatting their HTML emails in a garish 1997 Frontpage-generated style. I thought they were being ironic, but I think they’re sincere.
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Happy New Year!
And let’s have a great teens.
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On Christmas
A few years ago I stopped saying “Happy Holidays” as my default and switched to “Merry Christmas.” The main issue for me is that I didn’t want to get hung up on a name. As someone who doesn’t accept that Jesus Christ was the Son of God I don’t celebrate the season for that particular […]
The Trouble With Forgetting Your Own History
The Trouble With Standing Athwart History:
But of course this is the trouble with basing your political value system on things like authority and tradition. It’s always changing! William F Buckley’s determination to stand athwart history yelling stop led him to a robust defense of apartheid as a system of government for the American South. At […]
We are all cost vs. benefit utilitarians now!
Many liberals now want to kill the healthcare bill. At Talking Points Memo here is a dissent from an individual who is obviously going to get screwed if the bill is not passed:
If I feel abandoned, it’s not by Obama and the Democratic party, it’s by those on the left advocating to kill the bill.
I […]
The “new format”
The old theme broke on update. So I swapped in a random format. I’ve switched to the generic WP theme for now. Will try and get the old format back soon.
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The grain dole of America
Ben points to the a new article in The New York Times, Across U.S., Food Stamp Use Soars and Stigma Fades. The county-by-county data are of interest. I’ve just snatched the csv file, which they made available. Andrew Gelman has a modest critique of the…
The white vote for Obama, by county & correlates
A friend of mine who was looking at the distributions on obesity and diabetes wondered about their political correlations. To do that and add anything new it seems that it would be best to estimate the white vote for Barack Obama in 2008 by county. Thi…