Correlations: Red/Blue vs. IQ, income...

Brady just sent this link to a table showing a correlation between average personal income and how each state voted.

That page also contains a link to iSteve.com, which pretty convincingly dubunks the purported IQ correlation that's been going around. This guy (Steve Sailer) presents convincing evidence that that IQ data is just made up--most likely on the basis of income data that's used in the table above.

Sailer also makes the good points that (a) the IQ table is just something to make us Blue voters feel superior to the Red, and plays into the stereotype that Blue America looks down on Red America; and (b) it's hypocritical for us progressives to be using IQ data, since we're quick to dismiss it's use in something like The Bell Curve.

Caveat: iSteve Sailor is the movie critic for Pat Buchanan's The American Conservative and writes for a website called VDare.com, which is an odd anti-immigration site. (In what way odd? Other than the fact that it seems to be a self-contradictory and hypocritical to be an anti-immigrant American, check out the eytmology of Vdare.)

Also, I googled Vdare to try to figure out what they were all about, which led me to a Southern Poverty Law Center Intelligence Report:

Into the Mainstream:
An array of right-wing foundations and think tanks support efforts to make bigoted and discredited ideas respectable

I urge you to skim that report; we have to be aware how these extreme right wing groups are insidiously trying to move their repugnant and anti-American ideas into the mainstream of our civic life.