Month: June 2006
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Kos on “he said, she said” journalism
Back in 2004, Markos Zuniga of Daily Kos denounced “he said, she said” journalism: If more of the mainstream media took a page out of the Daily Show playbook, and contrasted Bush’s ridiculous statements and accusations with reality, we’d be a much better country. Fact check the shit out of both candidates, instead of this
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Bad economics at National Review
Writing at National Review Online, Jerry Bowyer illustrates the painfully stupid and misleading economics writing that Brad DeLong so often documents at the magazine: Imagine for a moment that you are a financial planner and you are advising a family that makes about $130,000 per year. Their total assets, including a house, stocks, and bonds,
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The new Gilded Age
The New York Times that was delivered to my house today included an advertising section titled “Autos: The New Gilded Age of Luxury.” Yes, the Gilded Age, an era of infamous inequality, is being invoked to sell luxury cars. Here’s an excerpt from the introductory ad copy, which revels in the decadence of today’s ultra-rich:
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Connie Chung loses it
If you haven’t seen the bizarre clip of Connie Chung’s signoff at the end of the last episode of her MSNBC show with Maury Povich, take a look — it is mesmerizingly bad: The New York Times tries but fails to explain what the hell she was thinking. (One theory I came up with: It
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Recent links and citations
For those who are interested, here are a few places where this blog and Spinsanity have been cited recently. Cathy Young cited Spinsanity’s criticism of Ann Coulter in a Boston Globe op-ed yesterday: Even O’Reilly has tempered his criticism by saying that, unlike left-wing satirist Al Franken, “Coulter doesn’t lie.” Yet the website spinsanity.org, equally
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A Jim Lehrer-themed birthday party
Look out Barney! A three-year-old in St. Paul had a birthday party with a Jim Lehrer theme. Here’s the cake: They also had Lehrer birthday hats: Just imagine the merchandising possibilities…
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Revisiting immigration in Iowa
Last week, I excoriated Cokie Roberts for dismissing concern about immigration in Iowa’s first Congressional district by saying that “it’s this very white area that doesn’t really have any immigrants.” As I wrote, the district is actually in about the 25th percentile among House districts nationwide in terms of the number of foreign born citizens,
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Nastiness from Rove and Kerry flack
How sad has our discourse become? On Monday, Karl Rove used an unfortunate military metaphor to attack John Kerry and John Murtha, a Vietnam veteran and a former Marine colonel, respectively: Rove told a New Hampshire audience Monday night that Democratic critics of the Iraq war such as John Kerry and John Murtha, both combat
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Ezra Klein fails causal inference 101
Tapped’s Ezra Klein, who is usually sharp, offers a seriously misguided argument in favor of increasing the minimum wage: [W]hile reasonable people can disagree on the impact of minimum wage laws, it’s time they stopped. William Niskanen, in arguing against a federal boost to the wage, trots out the same old canards about wage increases
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Jonathan Chait on the state of conservative (anti-)empiricism
The brilliant New Republic writer Jonathan Chait has spent years torturing conservatives (and himself) by compiling and analyzing the contradictions between conservative ideology and factual evidence. Unlike center-left opinion journalists, which generally bow toward Brookings-style empirical analysis, conservative intellectuals have been resolutely anti-empiricist in supporting supply-side economists (which economists shun), missile defense (questioned by physicists),