Pew's new Political Party Quiz puts respondents in cute little boxes

You would think that an organization as respectable as the Pew Research Center would take the opportunity during this election year to create a quiz/survey that allows you to analyze the issues that are being discussed. Or maybe the aim for the guys working at Pew is to curate fake data that is digestible by a mass audience and then sold to the ravenous for-profit media elite.

If you take a quick look at Pew’s new Political Party Quiz (created just in time for the beginning of the Republican National Convention in Tampa) it does none of the former and a lot of the latter. It compartmentalizes, it divides and it puts the issues in neat little boxes that can fit on a neat little spectrum.

What’s worse, if you do any thinking at all, you can figure out the answers which will align you with being a “Liberal Democrat” or a “Conservative Republican.”

Click on the jump to find out how to answer Pew’s quiz and ensure that you’re on the side of the spectrum you want to be. 

Cal football, Eshleman Hall and me (a Daily Cal retrospective)

Lots of Cal football fans like to dwell on Sept. 27, 2003. That was the last time the Bears beat USC. I’m sure that those two sentences will continue to go together until the end of time (or at least until the end of college football as we know it).

Sept. 27, 2003 is a distant memory for me. I experienced it as a high school senior hoping that I would be accepted to one of the two schools I saw on my TV screen. Whatever feelings I have now about that date I have picked up vicariously through those that were there and through the expectations of what it means to be a fan of Cal football.

But at the time, I just saw a great game and then texted my friends who had enrolled at Berkeley that fall. They weren’t at the game.

Another date does stand out though.

Sept. 29, 2007.