Conservatives

I recently played poker with a bunch of Republicans. My husband and I, both bleeding-heart liberals, are part owners of a cabin in the Sierra outside Fresno, a very conservative area. The Camp Sierra Assn. president has an annual poker game, and this year we, the newcomers, were invited. No one mentioned politics. We talked instead about our kids and Las Vegas and the odd warm weather. There was a lot of laughter and a lot of very good Scotch. I had fun even though I lost $4. When the game was over, we walked home with our across-the-road neighbors and invited them in for a final nightcap.

Re "Fusion power on the right," Opinion, March 19 Jonah Goldberg is right that libertarians and Conservatives share very close views on economic issues, but it's the social issues that push libertarians and even some Republicans into the liberal camp. If you strongly support free speech, voluntary military service, marriage equality and repealing drug laws, you are far to the left of conservatism. If and when we have a strong libertarian candidate the Republicans can accept, it will be Democrats, not conservatives, jumping into the libertarian camp.

“Conservatives lose faith in science,” trumpeted the headline on a story in last week's Times.   “A study … in the American Sociological Review concludes that trust in science among conservatives and frequent churchgoers has declined precipitously since 1974, when a national survey first asked people how much confidence they had in the scientific community. At that time, conservatives had the highest level of trust in scientists.” Though the article ran inside the paper on a weekday, it certainly didn't go unseen by Times letter writers.

Japan's conservative former ruling party made a dramatic comeback in elections Sunday, riding a wave of anxiety about rising China and economic stagnation. The resounding victory of the Liberal Democratic Party will put Shinzo Abe, a former prime minister, back in power, where he is likely to pursue a tougher stance toward China and prevent the nation from abandoning nuclear energy, despite last year's disaster at Fukshima. Exit polls by major Japanese broadcasters gave the Liberal Democratic Party 296 seats in Japan's 480-seat lower house, while its ally, the New Komeito Party, was projected to win 32. That would give them the two-thirds majority needed to overrule the upper house, perhaps breaking the deadlocks that have long stymied Japanese governments.

Rick Perry made no mention of Mitt Romney, the current delegate leader in the GOP nomination fight, in his remarks to CPAC attendees Thursday afternoon. Nor did he express further support for the man he endorsed for president after ending his own bid -- Newt Gingrich. But the Texas governor did give voice to the conservative activists who have yet to coalesce around a single candidate by imploring like-minded Republicans not to "settle" in the presidential race. "We do the American people no great service if we replace the current embodiment of big government with a lukewarm version of the same," Perry said.

In an early social media skirmish in the 2012 campaign, a conservative political group claims to have forced Facebook to temporarily shut down the event page for President Obama's online town hall meeting after steering hundreds of negative comments to the site. ForAmerica, a group that sprung up online during the debate over Obama's health care reform law, urged its nearly 1 million Facebook fans to swarm the landing page Facebook was using to collect questions to pose to him at Wednesday afternoon's live forum.

If South Carolina's conservatives needed any more evidence that they may splinter their vote and help Mitt Romney win a third victory, a GOP fund-raiser and candidate forum here provided it. Newt Gingrich told dyed-red Republicans from Greenville and Spartanburg counties that this is the most crucial election in their lifetime and they must anoint a conservative to run against President Obama. And so did Santorum. But interviews with some of the more than 500 people in the vast cafeteria of James F. Byrnes High School suggest that conservatives have not yet tilted heavily toward one over the other.

Now that "Avatar" has been named the best motion picture drama by the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn., making it a front-runner in the Oscar sweepstakes, does it mean the terrorists have won? Judging from the anger the movie has generated in some conservative circles, one might think so. Filmmaker James Cameron's science-fiction epic, which is on track to be the highest-grossing movie ever, has been widely derided as anti-American,liberal propaganda. That's funny, we thought it was just formulaic -- if incredibly artful -- escapist fantasy.

With so many scientific issues becoming battlefields in the culture wars - from climate change to stem-cell research to evolution (see above) - we hardly needed a new study to tell us that scientists have become a favorite target of the right. Yet a paper written by University of North Carolina doctoral fellow Gordon Gauchat and published last week in the American Sociological Review also contains a highly counterintuitive finding. Common sense, as well as past research, suggests that distrust of science correlates with lack of education; the less education a person has, the more likely he or she will favor traditional beliefs or religious dogma over scientific evidence.