Hannah Barbara Sides
Born Thanksgiving morning. 19 inches, 6.5 pounds. Our second. Mother and baby are well. Ethan doesn’t know what’s about to hit him.

Public Opinion on the Public Option, the Opt-Out, and the Trigger
I’ve written before on opinion toward various proposals about the public option — e.g., the option alone vs. with an opt-out provision. Last week, Quinnipiac released some new data that speaks to this question. These come from a poll of registered voters conducted from Nov. 9-16, 2009. At my request, they also supplied some additional cross-tabs, for which I am grateful. The poll included questions about the public option, the opt-out provision, and the trigger: Do you support or oppose giving p

Who Wants to Audit the Fed?
An interesting narrative emerged last week about Ron Paul’s victory in the House Financial Services Committee. After nearly thirty years of advocating reform of (aka abolishing) the Federal Reserve, Ron Paul’s amendment to subject the Fed to a comprehensive audit was adopted with the support of all of the panel’s Republicans and over half of the panel’s Democratic members. As The Huffington Post suggested soon thereafter, “Key to winning Democratic support was a letter posted early Thursday from labor leaders and progressive economists.” That support, the author continues, enabl

The political science of gays in the military
I was reading Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler’s “Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics”: for a forum elsewhere on the internets and came across this interesting finding. Using ANES data from 2004, Hetherington and Weiler find that 95% of those who scored the minimum on their scale for authoritarianism (e.g. attachment to strong and traditional notions of public morality etc) thought that gay people ought to be allowed join the armed forces, as against 79% of those with middling levels of authoritarianism and 67% of those who maxed out the scale. Hetherington and Weiler are interested in what this tells us about the differences between

Racism and Obamacare
The present study examines the relationship between racial prejudice and reactions to President Barack Obama and his policies. Before the 2008 election, participants’ levels of implicit and explicit anti-Black prejudice were measured. Over the following days and months, voting behavior, attitudes toward Obama, and attitudes toward Obama’s health care reform plan were assessed. Controlling for explicit prejudice, implicit prejudice predicted a reluctance to vote for Obama, opposition to his health care reform plan, and endorsement of specific concerns about the plan. In an experiment, the association between implicit prejudice and opposition to health care reform replicate