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Whiney Conservatives!

How to spot a baby conservative

KID POLITICS | Whiny children, claims a new study, tend to grow up rigid and traditional. Future liberals, on the other hand ...

Mar. 19, 2006. 10:45 AM

KURT KLEINER

SPECIAL TO THE STAR

Remember the whiny, insecure kid in nursery school, the one who always thought everyone was out to get him, and was always running to the teacher with complaints? Chances are he grew up to be a conservative.

At least, he did if he was one of 95 kids from the Berkeley area that social scientists have been tracking for the last 20 years. The confident, resilient, self-reliant kids mostly grew up to be liberals.

The study from the Journal of Research Into Personality isn't going to make the UC Berkeley professor who published it any friends on the right. Similar conclusions a few years ago from another academic saw him excoriated on right-wing blogs, and even led to a Congressional investigation into his research funding.

But the new results are worth a look. 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.

In a society that values self-confidence and out-goingness, it's a mostly flattering picture for liberals. It also runs contrary to the American stereotype of wimpy liberals and strong conservatives

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1142722231554&call_pageid=970599119419

The Osgood link for the article in Question.

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How to get wrapped up in the Abortion Issue 101

First there was this........

Osgood Censored

Editor, Times-Union:
While listening to WRSW 107.3FM at approximately 10:15 on March 7, I could not help but notice that one of my favorite spots, The Osgood Files, was interrupted as Charles Osgood began making comment on South Dakota's Gov. Mike Rounds intent to sign a new abortion bill into law. This was then followed by a replay of the earlier Osgood Files concerning military recruiters on campus. Is WRSW so sensitive to the abortion issue that they can't even broadcast their regularly scheduled programming, if it happens to pertain to abortion, regardless of the stance? Given the pre-paid and extremely redundant commercials WRSW broadcasts from the Life Issues Institute, I wouldn't think the Osgood Files would be breaking into any new territory.

I personally have absolutely no stand on this issue whatsoever. I feel that as a man, I could only have a somewhat diminished opinion if any, but also I feel given all the attention paid to this particular subject, that too many people ignore issues of more pressing and urgent need, of more paramount effect on our daily lives. Issues such as pollution, global warming, dependency on foreign oil, methamphetamine, child abuse and neglect, ect. ...

As one of the few features on WRSW that addresses important national issues from an intellectual standpoint, I am only distressed that even the Osgood Files seems to be subject to local pre-emption and censorship.

Ted Carter
Leesburg

Then there was this.........................

Ted Carter

Editor, Times-Union:
In response to the letter from Ted Carter: You think that pollution, global warming, depending on foreign oil, meth addiction, child abuse and neglect, etc. is more important than the murder of unborn babies. Excuse me, but that is also child abuse and neglect. What is done to those babies is atrocious and painful. They suffer being severely burned if saline injection is used. In partial-birth abortion, the doctor (if you can call them that) punches a hole in the base of the baby's skull and suction out their brain and then their little bodies are hacked up into pieces for whatever body parts or tissue that can be harvested with the remainder thrown away as so much trash.

As a man you were created in the image of God and for the purpose of loving him who first loved you.

Shame on you for being so cold and insensitive to human life created by God. How can you you say that, as a man, you personally have absolutely no stand on this issue whatsoever and that, as a man, you could only have a somewhat diminished opinion, if any?

How can that be when your mother chose life and therefore you live? Think about it. Think about the alternative. Now do you still have no opinion?

Be a man. Honor thy mother. Take a stand.

Faye Miller
Warsaw

Followed By This!

Subject: TO THE EDITOR

I would like to start this letter by personally thanking Gary Gerard for using my name as the title for the letter of rebuttal I am referring to. Now people who skim
through these letters will associate my name with the abortion issue, whereas it was not central to my original point. Thanks Pal.

I feel sorry for people who are so focused on one issue that they are essentially insensitive to any other. Perhaps this is why so many problems continue to go unsolved.

Obviously my point in the previous letter was lost, and that was a risk I was well aware of. That point would be the suggestion of possibility that local news organizations avoid politically controversial issues, out of fear of financial retribution from their advertisers.

I maintain that my position on abortion is that I have no position at all. I refuse to take a side and as a man I feel neither entitled nor compelled to do so, by you or anyone else. What is shameful is that as a Democrat and a purported Liberal, I can't bring other issues to light without them being overshadowed by abortion.

Where is the representation for those of us who agree and disagree with issues on both sides of the Liberal and Conservative divide. I'm tired of being pigeon holed, I'm tired of watching the general populace squabble over extremist ideologies and vote incompetent people into office because they stand a certain way on an issue regardless of what they can or will actually do about it. While we're standing around shaking our fists at each other over abortion or flag burning or Howard Stern, the people in power work their backroom, closed door sessions and continue to sell this country's future down the river. Did you know that yesterday congress voted to raise the national debt ceiling to $9 trillion dollars to prevent a first-ever default on U.S. Treasury notes? When the government reaches the new ceiling, expected sometime next year, the debt will represent $30,000 for every man, woman and child in the United States.

I suggest you wake up take a look around at what's really happening in this country.

P.S. Feel free to put my name on top of this one Gary.

Sincerely Ted Carter
Leesburg

STAY TUNED!!!

Just a Link to an Important Article

Even the Founder of the Conservative movement agrees.

Bill Clinton...Hell of a Guy!

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I mean C'mon

My thought from the Yahoo Message Boards

We are being enslaved.

Insanity. What you have is a Radical fundamentalist (Evangelistic Christian), who are typically not prone to rational thought, fighting with other radical fundamentalists, who are equally irrational. The a__holes get in power by throwing up smokescreens like Abortion and Flag Burning and and pull thier stuff when no ones looking, by then it's to late.

People are making money off this war. The United States is at it borrowing limit wit the world bank and we are already dipping into retirement accounts to pay our bills and fund military contracts. Essentially George Bush has enslaved the American People to the world bank so that Defense Contractors and Saudi Arabians may increase their already perverse profit margins.

I Posted these thoughts when responding to a Yahoo message board poster. (note the spelling errors). Thing is though, I got to thinking, what better way to control a populace that is getting to big for it's britches then to create a heavier tax burden to make it harder for them to retire or simply not work. Now everyone has to share the extra burden and work even harder to get ahead and put vast amounts of money into a really small group of mens pockets.

I really don't think this administration has Conservative or even Christian values in mind at all. I think it is being ran by a small number of greedy, evil powermongers who have been inside Washington for decades pulling the same strings, and George Bush is a clueless figurehead who was put up to it by his family and this cloister of insiders .

No one is safer, our national debt has skyrocketed, thousands have died and nothing was accomplished. Everything all the generals and think tanks have warned about has come true, yet small minded average American citizens still buy into this facade by the millions.
Am I insane, what am I missing here? I saw it 6 years ago, before 9/11, why cant semi-intelligent people see it now that it's been rubbed in our faces? Are we in Mass denial? ....I think so

Conservative Forum on Bush

Conservative Forum on Bush

SEE THIS LINK

Hope the article link stays alive. Bush and his venerable administration being called to the carpet by leading conservative think tank speakers. Again pointing out that this administration is anything but conservative and is using it's position to force a Fundmentalist Christian agenda at whatever the cost.
Fundamentalist's of any type or religion are delusional and dangerous.
We're are fighting fundmentalist radicalism in Iraq and Afghanistan, yet we have no credibility or moral high ground because of the evangelistic, God is always on our side mentality of this administration. They are borrowing and spending like a drunken sailor and are leaving the American people holding the bag, with the hope that somehow God will swoop in and save us in the end.
These are the same people believe in the Armageddon scenario and in this position they could bring it on through political and military means.

Again remember this isn't about Liberal and Conservative values, this is about Competent leadership.