Free Republic

Bee on Kavanaugh’s Confirmation Woes With sexual misconduct accusations imperiling the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh, various Republican lawmakers have pushed back hard. Some have suggested that they don’t want to let these allegations “destroy” or “ruin” his life. Samantha Bee rejected that argument on Wednesday. Expressing support for the accusers, Bee said she didn’t think being rejected from the nation’s highest court was the same as having one’s entire life destroyed. “No one’s life is ruined if they don’t get to be on the Supreme Court! Lots of people aren’t on the Supreme Court. Are you really...

Social science can be so amusing. There is a bit of a contretemps over several recent articles that used datasets supposedly measuring the personality traits of liberals and conservatives which has resulted in several abashed corrections. The researchers used the data in an effort to show that personality traits are not the cause of political attitudes, but instead both are correlated with some other factor, most likely genetic. Interesting enough. This finding is not what is being corrected. ..... The original article, "Correlation not Causation: The Relationship between Personality Traits and Political Ideologies," in the American Journal of Political Science...

Unfortunately it took a scandalous retraction three years later to admit it as the study's authors originally reported that the results indicated that conservatives had psychotic personality traits and liberals had traits associated with high social desirability.  This much-touted research study in fact revealed just the opposite: The authors regret that there is an error in the published version of “Correlation not Causation: The Relationship between Personality Traits and Political Ideologies” American Journal of Political Science 56 (1), 34–51. The interpretation of the coding of the political attitude items in the descriptive and preliminary analyses portion of the manuscript was...

Turns out liberals are the real authoritarians. A political-science journal that published an oft-cited study claiming conservatives were more likely to show traits associated with “psychoticism” now says it got it wrong. Very wrong. The American Journal of Political Science published a correction this year saying that the 2012 paper has “an error” — and that liberal political beliefs, not conservative ones, are actually linked to psychoticism. “The interpretation of the coding of the political attitude items in the descriptive and preliminary analyses portion of the manuscript was exactly reversed,” the journal said in the startling correction. “The descriptive analyses...

Low blows and dirty tricks in grand tradition By Alec Russell in Washington (Filed: 18/09/2004) If the feverish chatter among Washington's Democrats is anything to go by, the 2004 election campaign amounts to the death knell of American democracy. Since the August launch of devastating advertisements attacking Senator John Kerry's record in the Vietnam War, desperate Democrats have taken to fulminating that President George W Bush's campaign team has brought politics to a new low. The latest edition of Newsweek laments that the campaign is now in "slime time". It declares: "Fuelled by shadowy cash, the attacks get uglier and...