Idaho's conservative conservatives

Following up with thoughts from the previous post, that the electoral tendencies of moderates are defined in large part by the political atmospheres of the states they live in doesn't necessarily mean the same holds true for their more ideologically committed cohorts. Conservatives are sparse in California, but the state still produces hard-liners like Tom McClintock and Brian Bilbray.The following table ranks states by the percentages of their liberals...

Moderate is a moderate is a moderate?

Do liberals, moderates, and conservatives respectively vote Democratic, split, and Republican in roughly equal proportions across states, the difference being that the Wyoming breakdown is 14%/47%/39% while Vermont's is 32%/44%/24%? Or do Vermont's liberals, moderates, and conservatives all tend to be more liberal than Wyoming's liberals, moderates, and conservatives tend to be? To formulate an answer, let's ask the question "Is a moderate...

Gay bashing by race

We know from exit polling on California's Proposition 8 that blacks see gays as second-class citizens, but does this civic form of disenfranchisement also manifest itself in less genteel ways?! FBI statistics offer an answer. The following table shows offender rates by race for designated hate crimes committed against homosexuals as a percentage of the white (including Hispanic) offender rate, so anything over 100% indicates a higher propensity for...

Cop killing by race, gender

There are commonly held feelings ranging from mistrust to downright hatred of the police shared by many in the black community. The police, for their part, tend to spend a disproportionate (inordinate?) amount of time dealing with blacks because they're the ones who engage in a disproportionate amount of criminal activity. Cats go where the mice play.Criminals are a formidable breed of mouse, though, and sometimes they kill the cats who are after...

Oh, she sees just fine

What to make of this:Blacks are more than twice as likely as nonblacks (72 to 32 percent) to believe that Mr. Zimmerman (who is white and Hispanic) is guilty of a crime in shooting Trayvon, according to an April 2-4 Gallup survey of 3,006 Americans.... and this?: In a landmark ruling, a North Carolina judge on Friday vacated the death penalty of a black man convicted of murder, saying prosecutors across the state had engaged in deliberate and systematic...

Political news IQ

++Addition++See Steve's insights on the Pew results.---Expanding beyond the News IQ quizzes it periodically conducts, Pew Research recently released the results of what the organization calls the Political News IQ Quiz, which you can take here. I answered them all correctly, as I suspect the majority of readers of this blog and others like it will also do. Yet only 8% of the population fared as well, a reminder that the overwhelming majority of the...

How four ninjas became three

A bit of innocent atrocity from my childhood, captured on VHS (back in the nineties, when people still did that sort of thing). I'm in the Bears t-shirt and shorts. Be forewarned, this video, particularly with the volume turned up, isn't for the squeamish:Boys will be bo...

Black shoots unarmed Hispanic. Whatever, stuff happens. Now, justice for Travyon!

Given the utter lack of national media attention devoted to this story out of Phoenix, I'm not surprised to only be reading about it in the Steveosphere a week after it happened:About 7:30 p.m., a 22-year-old man and his girlfriend ordered food at the Taco Bell drive-thru and were told to pull up while their order was prepared.At the same time, Adkins stepped around a corner into the path of the vehicle and angry words were exchanged between he and...

Political orientation and educational attainment

In a forthcoming post, I look separately at the influences of IQ and educational attainment on fertility. I wanted to do something similar with political orientation, so here it is.The following tables show political orientation percentage distributions by educational attainment after roughly controlling for IQ. Respondents are broken up into five categories, each displayed in a separate table, in a way that approximates a normal distribution; Really...

Liberals marginally more intelligent than conservatives, who are considerably smarter than moderates

In response to Dennis Mangan's recent post discussing Satoshi Kanazawa's speculations as to why political liberals dominate Western institutions, I left the following comment. Rather than rehash it as a stand alone post, I'll just offer it again here. The body of Mangan's post offers fuller context if the line I excerpted from it is tough to comprehend:---the General Social Survey show that there's nearly an 11-point childhood IQ difference between...

Hispanics favor big, activist government

As the Hispanic tidal wave perpetually approaches election cycle after election cycle, always just about to crash upon the shoreline of US politics, establishment types repeatedly talk about the urgency with which Republicans need to Hispander or face electoral oblivion. This latest WSJ article is just the most recent incarnation of the phenomenon:Congressional Republicans and Mitt Romney's presidential campaign are working to fashion proposals that...

The hard-line conservative majority

I know, I know, pointing out a leftward skew in the major media is old hat. Jaded as I am, though, I'm still occasionally surprised by just how blatant the bias can be. From a story this morning on former corporate sponsors dropping their memberships to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) under pressure from Color of Change (what a surprise!), testosterone-laden...

That liberal won't hunt

OneSTDV's post in support of the idea of hunting led me to wonder about the political orientation of hunters. It has red-state written all over it, of course--NRA membership, male bonding, virility, self-reliance--so it comes as little surprise that hunters, as a group, lean conservative. But as the tagline captures this blog's raison d'etre, this must be quantified!The following table breaks political orientation down among hunters (or families...

Ranking The Simpsons seasons

++Addition++Steve expounds and adds a nice visual.---Those who've read this blog for awhile are probably aware of my affinity for The Simpsons. Like so many other fans of the show, I stopped making much of an effort to catch episodes from later seasons in the series. Well into the 2000s with family or friends who wanted to take one in, it would almost invariably be from the...