Politics

God's Own Party has a demographic advantage...from an article by Phillip Longman in USA Today:

What's the difference between Seattle and Salt Lake City? There are many differences, of course, but here's one you might not know. In Seattle, there are nearly 45% more dogs than children. In Salt Lake City, there are nearly 19% more kids than dogs. This curious fact might at first seem trivial, but it reflects a much broader and little-noticed demographic trend that has deep implications for the future of global culture and politics. It's not that people in a progressive city such as Seattle are so much fonder of dogs than are people in a conservative city such as Salt Lake City. It's that progressives are so much less likely to have children. It's a pattern found throughout the world, and it augers a far more conservative future - one in which patriarchy and other traditional values make a comeback, if only by default. Childlessness and small families are increasingly the norm today among progressive secularists. As a consequence, an increasing share of all children born into the world are descended from a share of the population whose conservative values have led them to raise large families. A single child replaces one of his or her parents, but not both. Consequently, a segment of society in which single-child families are the norm will decline in population by at least 50% per generation and quite quickly disappear. In the USA, the 17.4% of baby boomer women who had one child account for a mere 9.2% of kids produced by their generation. But among children of the baby boom, nearly a quarter descend from the mere 10% of baby boomer women who had four or more kids. This dynamic helps explain the gradual drift of American culture toward religious fundamentalism and social conservatism. Among states that voted for President Bush in 2004, the average fertility rate is more than 11% higher than the rate of states for Sen. John Kerry.

From an interesting opinion piece by Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal and OpinionJournal.com. After referencing notorious cheaters, liars, and miscreants like Barry Bonds, Andrew Fastow, Jack Abramoff, James Frey, etc., Henninger writes:

Politics killed ethical formation. Entire presidential campaigns and Supreme Court nominations are fought now over someone's idea of morality. What's right and wrong has become as red and blue as our politics. But look a little closer. These religious wars are about one thing: sex. After the 2004 "moral values" presidential election, Pew Research surveyed public attitudes. But the only explicitly identified determinants of moral belief named in their questionnaires are abortion, gay marriage and gay rights (and belief in God). Roe v. Wade, decided in 1973, ignited a 33-year war over sex, bowdlerized for political discourse as "privacy." Pew collapses all moral life in America down to abortion and gay rights because the political class believes those issues move votes. And the result is that anything else important, like what Messrs. Bonds [Barry baseball cheat]or Fastow [Andrew, Enron cheat] represent, is ignored. Our political culture's preoccupation with sexual boundaries has smothered the more important ability of religious or ethical formation to function in the U.S. Currently the most rigorous whole-person moral system resides among evangelical right--at least in terms of keeping one's earthly life in perspective. But because the religious right has "positions" on abortion and homosexuality, politics seeks to undermine its entire function in the life of the nation. Inner-city parents desperate to use vouchers to send their children to values-forming parochial schools can't, because the reigning political calculus holds this would somehow "advantage" an abortion-resistant Catholic Church. Meanwhile the only values taught now in public schools are diversity, tolerance and respect for the environment. I'll bet Andrew Fastow and Barry Bonds believe in all that to the bottom of their souls. Let's admit the bitter irony of the unending sex wars. They've obliterated the ability to talk rationally in public about anything that smacks of "religion." Too political. Thus a modest proposal: Maybe it's time for the sex obsessives on the left and right to take their fights over abortion and gay rights into a corner somewhere and give the rest of society space to restore some ethical rootedness in an endlessly variable world. Because letting the vacuum persist long enough on values useful to everyday life will breed too many little Bonds and little Fastows. And because the constant public magnification of these ethical breakdowns makes everyone feel like scuzz by association. It has a corrosive affect on the rest of us, on our sense of who we are.

Of course abortion, for example, isn't simply an issue of sex..

From an article in The Onion:

President Bush, already facing the lowest approval ratings in history, is coming under fire from former supporters over what they call his "ineffectual and incompetent" use of prayer for national guidance and assistance. "Every time the president is criticized, he insists that the nation is in his prayers," said the Family Research Council's Bob Jensen. "That may be, but it's becoming more and more clear that these prayers are either too infrequent, too brief, or not strongly worded enough to be effective." Despite assurances from the president that he "prays every day" for the nation's interests both at home and abroad, the mounting crises of recent months-escalating gas prices, the botched Dubai port security deal, ethics scandals, and the rising death toll in Iraq-have left many unimpressed with the effectiveness of his devotion. While newly released portions of White House prayer logs show that Bush's praying has actually gone up in recent months, critics are seeking to subpoena the documents in their entirety to determine the strength of those prayers. The harshest criticisms continue to come from members of the president's conservative base, who insist that the proper devotional words must be used in prayer. "There is a real possibility that the president misrepresented the number of times he invokes Jesus' power each day in accordance with the strict guidelines of scripture," said Henry Holbrook, senior fellow at the Intercession Institute, a leading conservative prayer tank. "Is he clasping his hands together tightly enough? Is he using the proper forms of the pronouns 'thine' and 'thou'? What about the verb 'hast'?"

A joke (a good one IMHO) of course, but there is some meat there...an illustration of how the non-religious look at those of us who pray as silly...and I can almost understand it if (since?) prayer so often seems so ineffectual?

An article by Kurt Kleiner in the Toronto Star titled "How to spot a baby conservative" describes a recent study published in the Journal of Research Into Personality.

In the 1960s Jack Block and his wife and fellow professor Jeanne Block (now deceased) began tracking more than 100 nursery school kids as part of a general study of personality. The kids' personalities were rated at the time by teachers and assistants who had known them for months. There's no reason to think political bias skewed the ratings - the investigators were not looking at political orientation back then. Even if they had been, it's unlikely that 3- and 4-year-olds would have had much idea about their political leanings. A few decades later, Block followed up with more surveys, looking again at personality, and this time at politics, too. The whiny kids tended to grow up conservative, and turned into rigid young adults who hewed closely to traditional gender roles and were uncomfortable with ambiguity. The confident kids turned out liberal and were still hanging loose, turning into bright, non-conforming adults with wide interests. The girls were still outgoing, but the young men tended to turn a little introspective. Block admits in his paper that liberal Berkeley is not representative of the whole country. But within his sample, he says, the results hold. He reasons that insecure kids look for the reassurance provided by tradition and authority, and find it in conservative politics. The more confident kids are eager to explore alternatives to the way things are, and find liberal politics more congenial.

Surely the study by a liberal Berkeley whacko will draw conservative's ire, but it's the last part of this article that I found most interesting...something to think about.

Whether anyone's feelings are hurt or not, the work suggests that personality and emotions play a bigger role in our political leanings than we think. All of us, liberal or conservative, feel as though we've reached our political opinions by carefully weighing the evidence and exercising our best judgment. But it could be that all of that careful reasoning is just after-the-fact self-justification. What if personality forms our political outlook, with reason coming along behind, rationalizing after the fact? It could be that whom we vote for has less to do with our judgments about tax policy or free trade or health care, and more with the personalities we've been stuck with since we were kids.

From an article by Martin Wolk on MSNBC:

...most estimates [of the cost of the Iraq war] put forward by White House officials in 2002 and 2003 were relatively low compared with the nation's gross domestic product, the size of the federal budget or the cost of past wars. White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey was the exception to the rule, offering an "upper bound" estimate of $100 billion to $200 billion in a September 2002 interview with The Wall Street Journal. That figure raised eyebrows at the time, although Lindsey argued the cost was small, adding, "The successful prosecution of the war would be good for the economy." U.S. direct spending on the war in Iraq already has surpassed the upper bound of Lindsey's upper bound, and most economists attribute billions more in indirect costs to the war effort. Even if the U.S. exits Iraq within another three years, total direct and indirect costs to U.S. taxpayers will likely by more than $400 billion, and one estimate puts the total economic impact at up to $2 trillion.