Follow-Up of the Day

Andrew Sullivan agrees that the Chicken Little act put on by pro-choice supporters before the Super Bowl was a bit too much.


On a lighter note, congratulations to the New Orleans Saints for their epic Superbowl win over the Indianapolis Colts.  Here's Tracy Porter's gnarly interception that really put it away for the Saints.  I found out yesterday that an interception being run back for a touchdown is known as a "pick six."  Football slang is great.

Statistics of the Day

I know I'm a little late with this, but my initial skepticism of the Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll that made such a splash among internet commentators last week kept me from talking about it until today.  After examining the methodology behind the study, I'm much more comfortable accepting it as legitimate.  Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com provides some great analysis.

If nothing else, this study proves once again how good the Republican party was at controlling its brand and its message.  As silly as some of these responses may seem, they stem from strict party discipline among Republican lawmakers and a desire to gain an advantage over President Obama by any means necessary.  The Republican modus operandi continues to be peddling demonstrably false statements.

Even more telling than the responses are the questions.  That Republicans overwhelmingly believe some of the things being asked is simply mind-boggling.  (One note--make sure to look at the scale of the Y-axis when looking at each graph on Nate Silver's page.  The graphs can be misleading without careful reading.)  Overall, the differences in responses from one GOP supporter to the next are negligible.  Only non-White persons answering questions about racism or Obama's birthplace had significantly different answers than their White counterparts.  And this is where things get complicated.

Since the presidential race in 2008, the GOP has been desperately trying to change the way it looks to the American people, but this survey shows how badly it is failing.  Republican opinion is now a feedback loop built on paranoia and stereotypes.  The irony of course is that, like anyone else, GOP members resent being stereotyped because it detracts from their ability to look like a party that truly fits the entire country.  This survey has exposed (again) how much Republican concentration goes into keeping cultural norms and social mores in place, and how unconcerned party members are with formulating policy that does anything else.

Until the Republican party gets serious about solving problems and not chasing figments of its imagination, it will continue to be a miserable afterthought in the minds of serious problem solvers.