Month: June 2006
-
Sharon Weinberger’s Imaginary Weapons
If you missed it, NPR’s “Fresh Air with Terry Gross” featured a fascinating interview yesterday with Sharon Weinberger, the editor-in-chief of Defense Technology International, about her new book Imaginary Weapons. Her description of the way that the Bush administration has shunned scientific peer review in the defense research and procurement process is disturbingly similar to
-
Duke lacrosse case: Evidence favors defense
Writing in the New York Times yesterday, columnist Nicholas Kristof summarizes how the weight of the evidence has grown against the Duke lacrosse prosecution: Time-stamped photos show the accuser dancing at a lacrosse team party at 12:04 a.m. and slumped outside the house where the party was taking place at 12:30 a.m., so the alleged
-
The politics of net neutrality
After Josh Marshall linked to the roll call tally for the “net neutrality” amendment, which was defeated 269-152 on Thursday in the House, I decided to take a closer look. A quick statistical analysis shows that the vote was predicted extremely well by the ideology of members of Congress (where ideology is measured by DW-NOMINATE
-
Recommended: The Wages of Wins
This is a blog about politics, not sports, but I want to briefly recommend The Wages of Wins by David J. Berri, Martin Schmidt, and Stacey Brook. The three authors, who are academic economists, do for basketball and football what Moneyball did for baseball. This is a book that is not to be missed if
-
Comment accessibility for the blind
I’ve been reminded that the comment verification process that Typepad uses to screen out spambots is inaccessible to blind people (see the discussion on Wikipedia). As a former employee of Benetech, which runs the Bookshare.org service for visually impaired and print disabled individuals, this does not make me happy. Unfortunately, however, there are no good
-
My quote on Prairie Home Companion
I was quoted in a Christian Science Monitor story about “Prairie Home Companion,” which has been adapted into a movie: “The show has never appealed to me,” says Brendan Nyhan, a grad student at Duke University in Durham, N.C. Mr. Nyhan has serious qualms about Keillor’s political activism. As a former editor at the media
-
Jon Stewart goes Colbert?
Is Jon Stewart following in Stephen Colbert’s footsteps? In late April, Colbert did a routine at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner that mocked President Bush with a series of easy, predictable jokes. It was not very good comedy, but it made liberals happy, and many thousands of words were blogged about how great Colbert was.
-
Hillary’s flag-burning feint fools Dowd, others
Does Maureen Dowd read her own newspaper? Today the controversial New York Times columnist writes the following: W. prefers tactical betes noires to real ones. (Hillary followed his lead by joining conservatives to support a constitutional ban on flag burning.) But as her own newspaper editorialized on Dec. 7: Hillary Clinton is co-sponsoring a bill
-
More conservative attacks on McCain ’08
Newt Gingrich’s triumph in a Minnesota GOP straw poll of support for potential 2008 candidates is meaningless, but the message circulated by state party leaders is not: Delegates received a two-page letter warning that McCain is widely viewed as the front-runner, creating “a significant risk that a moderate candidate will get the Republican nomination in
-
Cavuto’s double game
This article from Media Matters is a classic example of the games that the media bias warriors play: On Fox News’ Your World, host Neil Cavuto complained that “the media is all over” the alleged Haditha killings but that there has been “virtually no coverage of the daily savage attacks by insurgents on Iraqi civilians