As you may recall, President Obama held the "beer summit" in 2009 in an apparent effort to calm racial tensions. But can beer really bring us together politically? The results of new research show it's not that likely.

Democrats and Republicans can't come an agreement on much, and beer seems to be no exception, at least according to Scarborough Research data, analyzed by the National Journal. They took information from 200,000 interviews to craft their results. What they came up with is a graph that shows a scattering of dots across a chart showing which beers are preferred by which party. Check it out here:

The National Journal Beer Graph

I talked to Matthew McKinnon, a bartender at Firestone Public House in Sacramento. He says that the study breaks the cardinal rules of the bar - in that politics is one of the three things you’re not supposed to talk about while drinking. But when he told me that the other two were religion (valid) and sex, I assumed the other bar patrons would be breaking those rules as well, so I walked around asking what their beer choice says about them.

Sure enough, I found a Republican man who said that he drinks Sam Adams (the most GOP of the brews) because he was a patriot, and that he wouldn’t touch Corona because it was made “on the wrong side of the border.”

I also found a democrat who said that Sam Adams is too “uptight,” but that he prefers his Guiness.

The most bi-partisan beers are Bud Light and Miller High Life, which McKinnon told me he hadn’t tasted in at least a decade.

But, you say, Megan, “This can’t be the only elephants versus donkeys research story in the news today!” And you’re right. Check this out.

Republican congresswomen appear more "feminine" than their Democratic counterparts, according to a new study out of UCLA. Researchers fed portraits of all 434 members of the House of Representatives into a facial analyzing program and found that Republican women were nearly twice as likely to have characteristics that are seen as traditionally feminine.

After taking the party’s platforms into consideration, this is the result researchers were expecting, what they were testing for. UCLA’s Kerri Johnson says that’s because Republicans are more focused on reinforcing traditionally gender roles, while Democrats are more focused on breaking down gender barriers, such as equal pay.

What did surprise researchers though, was that the men of the GOP were found to be less masculine than their Democratic counterparts. They think that may be because it isn't as necessary for men to exhibit that masculinity because their platforms already send that message.

What do you think? Are Republican voters drawn to more feminine women? Could that explain 50 percent of the anchors on the Fox News Channel? Or Rachel Maddow on MSNBC?

How much does appearance play into your vote? And does evidence like this support or disprove the theory of the Republican ‘War on Women’? At a time when we’re a more bipartisan country than ever before, do studies like both of these just tear us apart, or is it important to notice and study our differences in hopes of getting past them to become a more bipartisan country? But perhaps most importantly…what are you drinking? I’ll stick with Miller High Life.