What Afghans Don't Know

What is this 9/11 thing of which you speak?  That may be the response of most Afghans, according to this Atlantic Wire mention of a Wall Street Journal story.

According to a survey of 15- to 30-year-old men in the two southern provinces where President Barack Obama sent the bulk of American surge troops, 92% of respondents said they didn't know about "this event which the foreigners call 9/11" after being read a three-paragraph description of the attacks.

 They must really wonder what the hell we're doing there.

WSJ and Pew, um, and TARP

I love the Pew Center's political knowledge index and I wrote about the latest version the other day, the one that found more Americans could correctly identify Twitter than TARP.  A Wall Street Journal article examines what people know and this question in particular.  Worth the read.

What Sarah Palin Knows

It's easy to poke fun of Sarah Palin, especially when it comes to political knowledge.  To balance the score, I point out this Wall Street Journal column and its eloquent defense of Palin.  It ends by paraphrasing an infamous quote by William F. Buckley, saying:

...in the spirit of which I hereby declare that I would rather be ruled by the Tea Party than by the Democratic Party, and I would rather have Sarah Palin sitting in the Oval Office than Barack Obama.

Not saying I necessarily agree, but the author, Norman Podhoretz, offers a spirited comparison between Palin and a conservative's most favored prez, Ronald Reagan.  And it's a point well worth considering. 

Squiggly Lines Redux

Remember my earlier post on CNN's squiggly debate lines? You know, the measure of emotional response by undecided voters watching the debates? Sure you remember.

Anyway, came across this WSJ article on how those lines may influence people watching CNN. Here's a quote:

"We don't realize how much we are influenced by other people," said Steven Fein, a social psychology professor at Williams College who has used footage from residential debates in experiments examining how voters might be swayed. "We can't ignore what we think other people think."

Damn right. Remember my infamous quote from that old old play: Public opinion is no more than this, what people think other people think. Nice to see someone else go that direction. And this makes twice in one day I've drawn from the Wall Street Journal. A new record for me.