NPR breathlessly reports on political trends with a fancy looking chart reproduced below in an online report entitled "Political Scientist: Republicans Most Conservative They've Been In 100 Years".  "Keith Poole of the University of Georgia, with his collaborator Howard Rosenthal of New York University, has spent decades charting the ideological shifts and polarization of the political parties in Congress from the 18th century until now to get the view of how the political landscape has changed from 30,000 feet up. What they have found is that the Republican Party is the most conservative it has been a century." The report goes on to quote Poole who has been working on this "for decades" and "who's viewed by other political scientists as the go-to expert on this issue". "This is an entirely objective statistical procedure. The graphs just reflect what comes out of the computer. Howard Rosenthal and I, we've been working on something called Nominate. This does all the Congresses...(Read Full Post)