The Washington Times reports:

RNC faces donor falloff, fires solicitors

The Republican National Committee, hit by a grass-roots donors' rebellion over President Bush's immigration policy, has fired all 65 of its telephone solicitors, The Washington Times has learned.

Faced with an estimated 40 percent falloff in small-donor contributions and aging phone-bank equipment that the RNC said would cost too much to update, Anne Hathaway, the committee's chief of staff, summoned the solicitations staff and told them they were out of work, effective immediately, fired staff members told The Times.

Several of the solicitors fired at the May 24 meeting reported declining contributions and a donor backlash against the immigration proposals now being pushed by Mr. Bush and Senate Republicans.

Every donor in 50 states we reached has been angry, especially in the last month and a half, and for 99 percent of them immigration is the No. 1 issue," said a fired phone bank employee who said the severance pay the RNC agreed to pay him was contingent on his not criticizing the national committee.

Is it possible that as nutty as George W. Bush obviously is, the core Republican base is even nuttier?

Today is my younger sister Lily's birthday, tomorrow is my mom's birthday, and the day after that is my slightly-less younger sister Emma's birthday.

Yesterday my cousin Randy got a full-time job working for Microsoft, which is really exciting for me because it means steady access to discounts from their employee store.

I've also now extended my streak in cashless tournaments at the Venetian to 17, but I've now also won in 7 straight cash sessions ($3,028, $420, $95, $540, $228, $385, $808).

The Mariners still haven't won my confidence yet, but they've finally scored more runs than they've allowed, which indicates that they might actually be a decent, if not great team, certainly better than the Yankees have been and hopefully will be. I've gotten bored with the NBA in recent years mostly because the Sonics have sucked, but between LeBron James finally stepping into his own and their opportunity to draft Kevin Durant, I'm looking forward to becoming a fair-weather fan again.

When your name is John McCain and Mitt Romney edges past you in a national poll, your campaign is over.

Over the course of a few days last week and into this weekend, I debated a poster (Chris Chang aka dogofjustice) on Paul Phillips' blog about whether environment or genetics plays a bigger role in determining differences amongst races in performance on things like standardized tests and IQ tests.

If you know me at all, you know I'm firmly in the environmental camp, but reading the full thread on Paul's blog will give you a sense of how deeply entrenched some people are in the genetic/hereditarian camp. It's frustrating to me because it seems so clear that the overwhelming weight of evidence points towards environmental explanations, yet so many people cling to genetic explanations.

One paper that is worth reading is "Testing for Racial Differences in the Mental Ability of Young Children" by Roland Fryer and Steven Levitt. Here is the abstract:

On tests of intelligence, Blacks systematically score worse than Whites. Some have argued that genetic differences across races account for the gap. Using a newly available nationally representative data set that includes a test of mental function for children aged eight to twelve months, we find only minor racial differences in test outcomes (0.06 standard deviation units in the raw data) between Blacks and Whites that disappear with the inclusion of a limited set of controls. Relative to Whites, children of all other races lose ground by age two. We confirm similar patterns in another large, but not nationally representative data set. A calibration exercise demonstrates that the observed patterns are broadly consistent with large racial differences in environmental factors that grow in importance as children age. Our findings are not consistent with the simplest models of large genetic differences across races in intelligence, although we cannot rule out the possibility that intelligence has multiple dimensions and racial differences are present only in those dimensions that emerge later in life.

One other paper that I highly recommend is "Thin Ice: 'Stereotype' Threat and Black College Students" by the Stanford psychologist Claude Steele (brother of Shelby Steele).

You can file this under wishful thinking, blog hearsay edition:

Gore at GWU: I'm thinking about running

Here's to hoping!

Let's all wish Senator John McCain a happy 73rd birthday! We're less than three months away and we need to start planning the party.

Wait, this just in...he won't be turning 73 in August...we're getting confirmation now...he will be 71, not 73...but what the hell, bigger is better, right? Let's stick with 73! Plus, he's losing his mind anyway, so he won't be able to tell the difference. It seems that the doddering septuagenarian is forgetting how to spell even the simplest words, like flack.

Actually, from what I hear, Senator McCain is aging so quickly that when he was in Iraq he couldn't even tell the difference between his flack jacket and his Depends underwear!

Clearly America's crotchetiest grandfather is just getting crochetier and crochetier with age. (Find those words in Merriam-Webster, Batman.)

I think we owe it to him to throw a big birthday celebration in August when he turns 78 years old. (Wait, sorry, it's 71, not 78.)

Seriously, though, if by some miracle, some great gift to the Democratic party, the elderly McCain does get his party's nomination, we should all throw a huge 72nd birthday bash for him in August 2008.

We definitely can do better than his 68th birthday party at which America's media elites celebrated the life of His Holy Greatness, Senator John McCain.

Guests included NBC's Tom Brokaw and Tim Russert, ABC's Peter Jennings, Barbara Walters, Ted Koppel and George Stephanopoulos, CBS's Mike Wallace, Dan Rather and Bob Schieffer, CBS News President AndrewHeyward, ABC News chief David Westin, Time Warner CEO Richard Parsons, CNN's Judy Woodruff and Jeff Greenfield, MSNBC's Chris Matthews, CNBC's Gloria Borger, PBS's Charlie Rose -- pause here to exhale -- and U.S. News & World Report publisher Mort Zuckerman, Washington Post Chairman Don Graham, New York Times columnists William Safire and David Brooks, author Michael Lewis and USA Today columnist Walter Shapiro.

In the meantime, I'll leave you with this hilarious report from MSNBC on spelling-gate. Play the clip all the way to the end. Sweet vindication baby!

This is a bizarre story about how an inaccurate and poorly written "news" article found its way into postings from three prominent bloggers. Here's the article:

Finger Length Predicts SAT Performance

A quick look at the lengths of children's index and ring fingers can be used to predict how well students will perform on SATs, new research claims.

Kids with longer ring fingers compared to index fingers are likely to have higher math scores than literacy or verbal scores on the college entrance exam, while children with the reverse finger-length ratio are likely to have higher reading and writing, or verbal, scores versus math scores.

Imagine my surprise when I found out that the study was conducted on 75 British 6 and 7 year-olds.

They're taking the SAT at age 6 and 7 in the UK? My gosh, I thought. I didn't take the SAT until I was 17! I wonder how old they are when they graduate from college. (Wait, aren't they called universities there?)

Then I did something stupid. Instead of just reading the LiveScience account of the research paper (which fails to mention that only 75 kids were studied), I actually went to the researcher's university and found this press release about his study. (I couldn't find the actual paper.) You know what? It turns out that the UK has something called an SAT, but it's not our college entrance exam. They call it the National Curriculum assessment, but it is also known as the standardised assessment test (SAT).

In other words, this study of 75 kids in the UK was did not say anything about our college entrance exam. It was about the British SATs.

Meanwhile, everybody in the States who had heard about this news seemed to be comparing their index and ring finger ratios trying to find out what their SAT scores were. (Hint, you can probably get the actual score from your college and maybe even from the College Board.)

In any event, it says something when a press release is better than an article.

So what are are Important bloggers saying about the study? Here's three comments, in increasing order of lameness and gullibility.

National Review's Jonah Goldberg calls it "exciting news about correlation". (Assuming that I'm understanding him correctly, I think that's pretty funny, and Goldberg wins the least gullible award.)

Award-winning economist Dr. Steven Levitt says the research is "So Strange I Actually Believe It."

Steve Sailer says it is a "a good reminder that what really makes people in the media mad about stereotypes is not when they are wrong, but when they are right. Essentially, feminism, multiculturalism, and PCism are wars against knowledge." He also adds: "My ring fingers are longer, but my Verbal SAT score was higher than my Math score."

(Gee, Steve, I thought you were an American. I didn't realize you went to school in the UK! Either that or you too were taken in by a false report in the media.)

Last week, the minority population of the United States crossed the 100 million mark for the first time.

That fact alone explains why the Bush Administration and other right-wing elites have worked so hard to portray efforts to increase minority electoral participation as vote fraud even though their claims have no basis in fact.

Why are they doing this?

It's simple math:

• 75% of minorities who voted in 2006 chose Democratic congressional candidates
• 1 in 5 Americans who voted in 2006 were minorities
• Yet 1 in 3 Americans are minorities
• With proportional turnout, 67% more minorities would have voted

Therefore, with proportional turnout, Democrats would have received 56% of the 2006 vote instead of 52%, winning by a gigantic 14-point margin instead of a 7-point margin.

Conservative Republican elites are understandably scared witless about this frightening (for them) fact of life. They know that if minority turnout increases, the Republican Party won't be able to win elections without appealing to minority voters.

The last thing these elites want is to do is moderate their hard line conservative views, so their response has been to establish a myth of rampant voter fraud perpetrated by Democrats and minority voters. The prominent Wall Street Journal editorial writer John Fund even wrote a book on the topic. He says:

Democrats are far more skilled at encouraging poor people — who need money — to participate in shady vote-buying schemes.

His sentence is a sufficiently idiotic attempt at propaganda that I need not offer a critique, just 4 digits followed seven letters: 2000 & Diebold.

Today's conservative elites may be less overtly racist than the white supremacists of the past, yet they still execute their political agenda with Orwellian precision. For example, Bush understands the symbolic importance of having a diverse cabinet -- yet his DOJ Civil Rights Division hasn't hired a single black attorney in four years and his administration has steadfastly pursued a racist vote-suppression agenda.

Far from being marginalized, racist ideology is fully integrated into the modern Republican Party machine.

On the airwaves, Fox News is a cheerleader for racist hosts and guests (see the clip below). Rush Limbaugh happily calls Barack Obama a "magic negro," yet Dick Cheney is a regular guest on his show. Online, Steve Sailer, a popular conservative columnist for the white nationalist web site VDARE.com contributor calls Obama a "wigger" and is praised as a "genius" by National Review's John Derbyshire. The Bell Curve's 1994 argument that the intellectual abilities of minorities are genetically inferior to whites is now a widely accepted truism amongst conservatives; indeed, one of its authors, Charles Murray, was rewarded with a plum post at the American Enterprise Institute, a mainstream Republican think-tank.

As bleak things may seem, there is cause for hope. Some brave leaders in the Republican Party are willing to stand up to their racist colleagues. Perhaps most notable among them is Florida Governor Charlie Crist who recently reformed Florida's ineffective and draconian ban on ex-felon voting, a ban which disenfranchised non-felons as well as ex-felons.

For all of us, let's hope the Crists of the GOP manage to reclaim their party from the grips of racist conservative elites.

On Wednesday Glenn Greenwald took Joe Klein to task for journalistic improprieties. Greenwald distills the issue brilliantly:

the very idea of granting anonymity to government sources to do nothing other than repeat pro-government claims is both manipulative and moronic on its face. What possible journalistic value could there ever be in cloaking someone with anonymity in order to say something that Tony Snow would happily say, and does say, every day from the White House Press Briefing Room?

Amazingly, most journalists in Washington, DC don't agree with Greenwald.