Month: April 2011

Part of the series, Assault on Florida.

In just 100 days in office, Gov. Rick Scott has managed to turn a majority of Floridians against him and his autocratic style of — if we can call it that — governing. A new poll from Suffolk University shows Scott’s numbers headed south:

When asked to characterize Republican Gov. Rick Scott’s first 100 days in office, 41 percent of respondents said “negative and damaging,” compared with 26 percent who said “positive and productive.” Twenty percent felt Scott’s actions over the last three months have had “little impact.” Overall, 53 percent said they disagreed with how Scott is governing the state. Of those disapproving, 18 percent were registered Republicans, 57 percent were Democrats and 25 percent independents/no party.

David Paleologos, director of the Political Research Center at Boston’s Suffolk University, summed it up this way:

“So much for a political honeymoon; it’s taken Gov. Scott less than 100 days to begin a freefall in popularity and to generate negative perceptions about job performance and damaging the state he was elected to lead. There has been a backlash in public opinion on both sides of the aisle in response to his aggressive and uncompromising leadership style.”

Floridians still feel like the state is in the throes of a weak economy, according to the poll, with 88 percent of respondents saying they did not believe the recession is over in the Sunshine State, down just 1 point from October 2010. While 40 percent said Scott’s plan to cut corporate taxes and regulations would help bring jobs to Florida, 42 percent said they felt corporate taxes in Florida are too low.

Surprisingly, Scott’s controversial order requiring state employees and job applicants to undergo mandatory drug testing was supported by 74 percent of respondents. However, a strong majority of 63 percent opposed Scott’s proposed cuts to K-12 education.

Well, now it’s official. What we liberals always suspected has been proven by science — conservatives’ brains are messed up, which is why they think and act the way they do.

According to a new study published in Current Biology, there is a marked contrast between liberal and conservative brains:

Substantial differences exist in the cognitive styles of liberals and conservatives on psychological measures [1]. Variability in political attitudes reflects genetic influences and their interaction with environmental factors [2,3]. Recent work has shown a correlation between liberalism and conflict-related activity measured by event-related potentials originating in the anterior cingulate cortex [4]. Here we show that this functional correlate of political attitudes has a counterpart in brain structure. In a large sample of young adults, we related self-reported political attitudes to gray matter volume using structural MRI. We found that greater liberalism was associated with increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex, whereas greater conservatism was associated with increased volume of the right amygdala.

OK, since I don’t subscribe to Current Biology and I don’t want to pay $31.50 for a paper that confirms what I’ve thought all along — i.e., that conservatives have bad brains — I had to do some research to figure out what the abstract above really means.

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