Political partisans don't use logic

A new study here at livescience.com shows that political partisans use emotion rather than logic when evaluating political statements.

From the article:

"The tests involved pairs of statements by the candidates, President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry, that clearly contradicted each other. The test subjects were asked to consider and rate the discrepancy. Then they were presented with another statement that might explain away the contradiction. The scenario was repeated several times for each candidate.

"The brain imaging revealed a consistent pattern. Both Republicans and Democrats consistently denied obvious contradictions for their own candidate but detected contradictions in the opposing candidate.

'The result is that partisan beliefs are calcified, and the person can learn very little from new data,' Westen said.

"Notably absent were any increases in activation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain most associated with reasoning."

Gonzales v. Oregon

The Supreme Court yesterday upheld Oregon's decision to allow doctors to prescribe drugs for suicides, a violation of federal drug law.

I was hoping that the decision, Gonzales v. Oregon, had upheld states' rights, but instead it seems that the court only said that the attorney general didn't go after them quite right. In combination with Gonzales v. Raich, which allowed federal regulations to trump California drug law, it looks like the current court shows little opposition to unconstitutional federal drug laws.

For an illustration to paleocons as to the error of such laws, the Ninth Circuit ruled in United States v. Stewart that a man who built his own machine guns couldn't be prosecuted for their possession under commerce clause-based firearms law. In light of the Raich decision, the Supreme Court vacated* Stewart.

Props to Clarence Thomas for arguing for federalism in both Oregon and Raich. In his Oregon dissent, he quotes 545 U.S. at 27, n38, that states have "traditional police powers to define the criminal law and to protect the health, safety, and welfare of their citizens."

*ordered a new decision