A new study entitled “Political Extremism Is Supported by an Illusion of Understanding,” is published in the journal Psychological Science. The results suggest that simply asking people to demonstrate some knowledge on a polarizing issue can have a moderating effect on their viewpoint. Democrats, Republicans, as well as Independents were among the 198 U.S. residents who participated in the study.

The report is preceded by something Clint Eastwood told Time in 2005. “Extremism is so easy. You’ve got your position and that’s it. It doesn’t take much thought.”

In one portion of the study, participants were asked to rank several polarizing issues on a scale from “strongly against” to “strongly in favor.” At that point, they were asked to rate their level of understanding on the issue and then to “provide a mechanistic explanation” for the policy. After assessing their level of knowledge and providing the detailed explanation, participants were once again asked to rate the issue on the same scale; “strongly against” to “strongly in favor.”

The result? According to the study, “asking people to explain how policies work decreased their reported understanding of those policies and led them to report more moderate attitudes toward those policies.”

Translation: extreme positions tend to become not-quite-so extreme once people reflect on how knowledgeable they are on the topic.

In the end, the researchers posit that their research “suggests one simple way to induce moderation, asking them to explain their positions mechanistically.”

In her first interview since announcing her decision not to run for reelection when her congressional term ends in 2014, the Tea Party favorite made it known that she is by no means stepping back from politics entirely.

“In fact I may run for another public office. That could happen,” Bachmann told Sean Hannity on Fox News Thursday evening. “But for right now I’m going to find a different perch in order to be able to weigh in on these matters.”

Bachmann stopped short of writing off a 2016 presidential campaign as well, telling Hannity that although it was not a top consideration, 2016 is “not off the table.”

Bachmann also reflected on the activities she felt set her apart during her time in Congress. Bachmann says she led the charge in “dealing with the rise of Islamic Jihad,” and dubbed herself the “champion of repealing Obamacare.” No, you didn’t miss anything. Despite 37 attempts by House Republicans to repeal Obamacare, it remains on the books.

Regardless of a political comeback is in Michele Bachmann’s future, the fact remains that another Republican will be on the 2014 ballot in Bachmann’s district. On Wednesda, former State Rep. Tom Emmer announced that he was launching a bid for the seat. If you were hoping for a Republican with a more progressive outlook than Bachmann on issues like same-sex marriage, you will have to look further than Tom Emmer.

During Emmer’s failed bid for governor in 2010, he raised eyebrows for stammering through a question on whether he believed in evolution, and faced a backlash for proposing legislation that would lower the minimum wage for waiters and waitresses. Emmer was called a “straight-talking Hockey Dad” in an endorsement from Sarah Palin.

Take a look at the Hardball Sideshow for more on Michele Bachmann’s future plans, and what could be in the cards next for Minnesota.

At a Dallas County GOP event last month, Bishop John Lawson asked Ken Emanuelson, a Tea Party activist, what the Republican Party was doing for African-American voters. The progressive group Battleground Texas posted audio from the event.

“I’m going to be real honest with you,” Emanuelson said. “The Republican Party doesn’t want black people to vote if they are going to vote 9-to-1 for Democrats.”

In Emanuelson’s view, in other words, the solution to lack of support from African-American voters is to have fewer of them show up at the polls.

When the inevitable criticism ensued, Emanuelson backtracked. In a post on his Facebook page, the Tea Party activist acknowledged that he “misspoke” and tried to clarify what he was getting at. “What I meant, and should have said, is that it is not, in my personal opinion, in the interests of the Republican Party to spend its own time and energy working to generally increase the number of Democratic voters at the polls, and at this point in time, nine of every ten African-American voters cast their votes for the Democratic Party.”

Emanuelson said he holds “no position of authority within the Republican Party.” It’s tough to see Emanuelson as some rogue element in Texas politics, however. The event where his remarks took place was part of “Battlefield Dallas,” a GOP initiative supported by Texas State GOP Chairman Steve Munisteri.

Voter suppression efforts are still alive for the next round of elections.

But take note. The push for voting restrictions in the last election may have actually led to higher levels of voter turnout among African-Americans. According to The Associated Press, black voter turnout actually surpassed white voter turnout in the 2012 election: 66.2% of eligible black voters cast a ballot, while 64.1% of white voters did the same.

These findings are not dramatically different from the overall post-election autopsy released by the Republican National Committee earlier this year. Unfortunately for Republicans hoping to address voters’ concerns, some members of the party continue to make the same blunders that caused problems in 2012.

Enter Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant, who participated in a Washington Post Live forum with fellow governors Jack Markell of Delaware (a Democrat) and Republican Susana Martinez of New Mexico. The panel focused largely on the U.S. education system, with emphasis on childhood literacy. At one point, the moderator asked the state leaders why the system tended to produce “mediocre” outcomes in areas like reading proficiency.

Governor Bryant chimed in first. “Both parents started working,” he began. “Mom is in the workplace.”

Bryant shifted gears almost immediately, joking that his response would provoke backlash, and commending the advancement of women in the workplace (specifically gesturing to the woman moderating the discussion).

“I can see the emails tomorrow,” he said, before expanding on his answer and pointing to the fact that both parents have less time on their hands due to pressure in the work environment.

But the bottom line is that Governor Bryant’s response to a question about the problems in our education system had exactly zero to do with teachers or school policies. Should parents really take the brunt of the blame for poor results in reading proficiency? In fact, that approach seems to offer no path to improving education here in the United States. Should we encourage more parents not to put their own education to use in the workforce?

Take a look at the Hardball Sideshow for more on Governor Bryant’s comments.

Bishop E.W. Jackson, the GOP nominee for lieutenant governor, drew the most attention, in no small part due to his history of controversial comments on everything for homosexuality to Planned Parenthood to President Obama, whom he suggested harbored “Muslim sensibilities.”

Republicans and Democrats alike stood by waiting to see how Republcian nominee for governor Ken Cuccinelli would handle the situation . Endorse Jackson? Say nothing? Call him out for some of the remarks he’s made? It turned out to be something of a dodge. “We are not defending any of our running mate’s statements now or in the future,” Cuccinelli said in a statement to The Virginian-Pilot.

In Virginia, the candidates for governor and lieutenant governor run separately.

It’s hard to see how that would be sufficient when there are still several months to go before the election, but there’s another twist to add to the mix. According to Jackson, it was Cuccinelli who nudged him to run for lieutenant governor, back when Jackson was in the midst of his 2010 campaign for Senate. “He said essentially: I think you’d make a good candidate for lieutenant governor. Have you thought about it?” Jackson said in an interview with The Washington Post. “I do remember him suggesting that if it worked out, he would be proud to have me as a running mate.”

The Cuccinelli campaign says Jackson may have gotten the wrong idea. A campaign spokeswoman responded to The Washington Post via email. “Ken asked why the Senate and if he ever thought to run for anything else—like maybe Lieutenant Governor? E.W. may have misconstrued that as a direct ask,” explained Anna Nix.

While it might seem like the Republican candidates are in for an uphill battle in the Virginia gubernatorial race, it’s not exactly looking like an easy ride for Democrats either. Both Cuccinelli and Terry McAuliffe, his Democrat challenger, showed high unfavorability ratings in a recent survey from Public Policy Polling. McAuliffe came in at 29% favorable to 33% unfavorable, while Cuccinelli fared worse with 32% favorability and 44% unfavorability.

Time Magazine’s Swampland blog characterized the faceoff as “The Dirtiest, Nastiest, Low-Down Campaign in America”–and that’s just the headline. According to the piece, a Republican with knowledge of the Cuccinelli campaign described the race as “a race to the bottom,” and aides on the Democratic side did not disagree.

Check out Hardball‘s sideshow video above for more.

While that was going on, it was tough to ignore the fact that Reagan’s positions would have put him at odds with the far-right positions of most of the candidates. In contrast to the GOP candidates, Reagan was not only open to raising taxes, he did so more than once. Somewhere between Reagan’s time in office and the 2012 primary, even talk of compromise became a sign of weakness.

While many people do see the dramatic shift to the right taken by the Republican Party since Reagan was in Office, it’s not often that you hear someone blame President Reagan for the election of President Obama. But now you have, thanks to Iowa Congressman Steve King.

For King, the road to President Obama’s election began in 1986, when President Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which granted amnesty to many immigrants who arrived in the United States prior to 1982. In King’s estimation, the influx of new citizens gave rise to the current generation of Latino voters…in other words, more people who voted for Obama.

“There is something like 15 million people in this country, not just counting deaths and those that might have gone back, that were the beneficiaries of the 1986 Amnesty Act,” he said at a hearing with the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday. “I’d just pose this question. Does anybody think that Barack Obama would be president today if the 1986 Amnesty Act had not become law?”

There’s no question that something went wrong for Republicans in the 2012 election regarding, but not limited to, Latino voters. President Obama netted 71% of the Latino vote compared to Romney’s 27%. Pinning the blame on Ronald Reagan however, is really quite the stretch.

Consider the obstacles to Latino support demonstrated by Congressman King himself. He’s compared selecting the best immigrants to the process of choosing a dog, and relentlessly advocated for an “English only” bill.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have shown a commitment to comprehensive immigration reform, largely because of the demographic shift we’ve seen in recent generations. In the interim though, it seems like Republicans can count on Steve King to keep on keeping on when it comes to alienating an increasingly significant portion of the electorate.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article referred to Congressman King’s comparison between dogs and immigrants as one related to undocumented immigrants. This has been corrected.

Yes, we’re talking about Anthony Weiner.

Weiner officially announced his campaign via Youtube around midnight on Tuesday, drawing speculation that the announcement was strategically timed to prevent New York City tabloids from pun-laden headlines about his announcement.

Since the big reveal, things haven’t exactly been smooth sailing. If you happened to log onto Weiner’s campaign website before this afternoon, you might have noticed that the imagery behind Weiner’s campaign logo featured a skyline. Picturesque? Yes. The problem was, it was the Pittsbugh skyline. The error was fixed but the screenshots live on.

That aside, even the candidate acknowledges that there’s no way to avoid having his campaign double as an ongoing apology tour. “I have apologized many, many times to my wife, and frankly I know that part of this process is going to be doing a lot of apologizing,” he said in an interview with WNYC.

Weiner did not rule out the possible existence of additional snapshots like the ones that led to his resignation from Congress.

“If reporters want to go and try to find more–I can’t say whether they’ll be able to find another picture or another person who may want to come out on their own,” he told WNYC.

Then there’s the question of how other prominent politicians with ties to the candidate and New York in general are reacting to Weiner’s mayoral bid.

Speaking with reporters in Buffalo yesterday, a fellow Democrat, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, started out coy. “None. No reaction. None. Look, my face didn’t move. No reaction.” By day’s end however, Cuomo  had shifted gears and said that it would be “shame on us” for New Yorkers if Weiner were elected.

There’s was initial speculation about whether Bill and Hillary Clinton will show support for Anthony Weiner, given their close ties to Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin. Abedin served as a close aide to Hillary Clinton during her stint as Secretary of State. Speculation ended when a spokesman for Hillary Clinton provided a statement to Politico. “Secretary Clinton knows all of the candidates, she has worked with many of them, and is close with many of them, so won’t be weighing in one way or the other,” said spokesman Nick Merrill.

We’re just a few weeks out from the successful comeback of Republican Mark Sanford. Just four years after his fabricated hike on the Appalachian Trail that turned out to be an extramarital affair in Argentina, the former South Carolina governor won a congressional race in South Carolina. Weiner says he’s not looking to follow in Sanford’s footsteps.

“I don’t look at my race through the lens of anyone else’s experience,” Weiner told Talking Points Memo. “Believe me, mine is unique enough.”

E.W. Jackson snagged the nomination for lieutenant governor, putting the squeeze on Cuccinelli and other Republicans looking to strike a more moderate tone.

Jackson, an African-American pastor and lawyer, has a history of extreme statements on everything from Planned Parenthood to homosexuality and even constitutional history.

“We are not defending any of our running mates’ statements now or in the future,” Cuccinelli said in a statement to The Virginian-Pilot. “The people of Virginia need to get comfortable with each candidate individually.”

In a Youtube video posted last fall, Jackson rails against Planned Parenthood, suggesting that the organization is on par with the Ku Klux Klan, or worse.

“The Democrat Party has created an unholy alliance between certain so-called civil rights leaders and Planned Parenthood, which has killed unborn black babies by the tens of millions. Planned Parenthood has been far more lethal to black lives than the KKK ever was. And the Democrat Party and the black civil rights allies are partners in this genocide.”

In a 2010 blog post, Jackson wrote that President Obama has a “Muslim perspective” on the world and that these “Muslim sensibilities” could be dangerous for Israel.

According to Jackson, Michelle Obama and her husband are “the intellectual cousins and heirs of a Communist, collectivist way of thinking which is anathema to what this country is all about.”

He also seems to misunderstand the three-fifths compromise that existed in the early days of the U.S. Constitution. As you probably learned in history class, the compromise was meant to beef up representation in Congress for southern states. Even though slaves had no say whatsoever in government, Congress agreed to count each slave as three-fifths of a person, therefore increasing the population count for slave-holding states, and rewarding them with a few more representatives in Congress.

It would be tough to characterize that piece of history as “anti-slavery,” but Jackson did so during his run for Senate in 2011. Jackson took issue with a pastor who suggested that the clause was evidence of our country’s history of racism. This wasn’t just any church service though: President Obama was in attendance.

“Rev. [Charles Wallace] Smith must not have understood the 3/5ths clause was an anti-slavery amendment. Its purpose was to limit the voting power of slave-holding states,” Jackson said in a statement.

Jackson has also said he sees a “direct connection” between homosexuality and pedophilia.

In a post-election report, a Republican committee wrote, “Our candidates and office holders need to do a better job talking in normal, people-oriented terms and we need to go to communities where Republicans do not normally go to listen and make our case.”

So much for that!

Now it’s up to Republican Ken Cuccinelli to appeal to minorities, gays, women, and moderates while running on the same party ticket as Jackson.

In April of 2012, Nugent scored a meeting with the U.S. Secret Service for remarks he made at the annual National Rifle Association convention. “If Barack Obama becomes the president in November, I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year,” Nugent said at the event. Ted Nugent is both alive and not in prison despite President Obama’s reelection.

In the aftermath of the Newtown massacre and the subsequent push for expanded background checks and other gun-control measures, Nugent has continued to speak out on the pro-gun side of the debate.

In February, Nugent sat down with CNN’s Piers Morgan (in a gun shop) to talk gun-rights. The conversation quickly escalated to the point that Nugent accused Morgan of being “obsessed with guns.”

But there’s another Nugent talking about Second Amendment rights these days, though in a far less polarizing tone. Jeffrey Nugent, Ted’s older brother, presented his take on gun-rights in a Washington Post op-ed published on Friday.

I want all those who are qualified to purchase a gun to be able to do so. But—and here is where I part ways with my brother—not everyone is qualified to own a gun, so expanded background checks should be a legislative priority.

Nugent says background checks should not be seen as an attack on liberty.

Enhanced background checks need not threaten the Second Amendment. Why are the NRA and the elected representatives who support it so slow to realize this? Or do they fear a slippery slope toward greater restrictions on gun rights? If they don’t want to burden a flawed system, they should be part of fixing it.

Jeffrey Nugent says his brother “speaks in extremes to make his points,” and calls on the new NRA leadership to advocate background checks. However, given the slate of individuals leading the charge at the National Rifle Association, that seems unlikely.

Actually, the lawmaker’s path back to the Tea Party spotlight began at the Conservative Political Action Conference back in March. During her speech, Bachmann drew material from a thinly-sourced book about President Obama’s lifestyle in the White House. “A new book is out talking about the perks and the excess of the $1.4-billion-a-year presidency that we’re paying for,” she said. “And this is a lifestyle that is one of excess. Now we find out that there are five chefs on Air Force One.”

These statements later proved to be factually-challenged. When CNN’s Dana Bash attempted to follow up with the Congresswoman, Bachmann practically ran away, all the while pointing out that the real point of her speech was the attack in Benghazi.

Days later, Bachmann took to the House floor to reprise her warning us about the perils of Obamacare. “Let’s repeal this failure before it literally kills women, kills children, kills senior citizens,” she said.

Now to this week. On Thursday, Bachmann joined fellow Tea Partiers like Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert to address developments on the Internal Revenue Service’s improper targeting of conservative-leaning groups prior to the last election cycle. Bachmann was arguably the voice of reason in the group of speakers, stressing that it would be wrong to “jump to conclusions” and start considering impeaching President Obama so early in the investigation.

There are still 17 months before voters in Minnesota decide whether Bachmann will get another term in Congress. It’s looking like she will once again face off against Democrat Jim Graves, a hotel executive who narrowly lost to Bachmann in the most recent election.

As television viewers in Minnesota found out yesterday, Bachmann is getting an early start on the 2014 campaign. Her first ad buy took effect today, in the same week that House Republicans made their 37^th attempt at repealing Obamacare. The repeal passed by a 229-195 vote.

“Great news!” Bachmann begins in the ad. “The U.S. House just passed my bill to repeal Obamacare.”

Of course, there’s no chance the bill could become law in the Democratic-controlled Senate and the White House’s promise to veto such a measure.

Still, at yesterday’s briefing, Speaker of the House John Boehner confirmed that the door to attempt #38 was in the cards.

Take a look at the Hardball Sideshow for more!