Did you hear Crystal Ball's rant on the Cycle asking Hillary not to run?

[tomg]

352. One of the things I

tend to do is find out information regarding folks on the mastheads of various organizations. Sometimes I even check out various boards of trustees. Dr. Lichtenberg is an interesting case. She was formerly ( might still be, info on these things often being sketchy) associated with Columbia Commonwealth University, a diploma mill based out of Missoula, Montana which, itself, came out of an even dicier background. I believe in its current manifestation, its accreditation, accepted pretty much nowhere in the US, comes from the government of Malawi. As someone who has sat on a lot of search committees, sometimes Ph.d really does mean "piled higher and deeper."

That does not discredit OnTheIssues ( or even Dr. Lichtenberg who was, I believe, CCU's accreditation officer) which I think does a service simply by supplying information to voters, particularly as to how one votes.

Regarding their chart, though, I think part of the problem is that terms like "conservative," "liberal" and such are notoriously slippery and, particularly given current uses as assigned to current politicans, the terms are so fluid that, in some ways, are meaningless, other than as general indicators. If the site had, say, certain established figures that by historical consensus we generally agree were "liberal" ( like FDR) or "conservative (Goldwater) or "populist" (Huey Long) and place them on the scale so we could whomevers position relative to that historical figure, it might help. There are other ways regarding social issues where one generation's liberal on economic issues is a later generation's sexist or homophobe or racist ( and probably all three).