Month: July 2006
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50% think Saddam had WMD?
Via Kevin Drum, a new Harris poll suggests that misperceptions about Iraqi WMD have increased during the last year: Despite being widely reported in the media that the U.S. and other countries have not found any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, surprisingly; more U.S. adults (50%) think that Iraq had such weapons when the
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Washington Post: Bellwethers
The Washington Post has put together a nice table dividing key Congressional races into a series of categories based on the key issues in each one (example: “Anxious Suburbs » Will the Iraq War come home in November?”). Definitely worth a look.
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Revisiting the nature/nurture debate on IQ
This week’s New York Times Magazine includes a fascinating article about the flaws in the research on the determinants of intelligence. Previously, as the article points out, studies had shown that “a person’s I.Q. is remarkably stable and that about three-quarters of I.Q. differences between individuals are attributable to heredity” — a depressing finding for
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Newsweek gets Bush/Putin exchange wrong
This week’s Newsweek contains a long cover story about President Bush’s visit to the G8 summit and his response to the Mideast crisis. But for all the tick-tock details, the article offers very little insight, as Greg Sargent points out. More importantly, it mischaracterizes a major incident during Bush’s trip — his repartee with Vladimir
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Fox News pushes Hezbollah WMD rumor
We will never get rid of the misperception that Saddam Hussein had WMDs as long as Fox News is around. Media Matters is reporting that the channel aired an absurd discussion of — get this — whether Saddam had WMDs that were given to Syria and then passed to Hezbollah: During a segment in which
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Wired endorses stem cell “ban” language
In an otherwise useful fact-checking article on claims made during the stem cell debate in Congress, Wired News endorses the misleading “ban” rhetoric of John Kerry and other supporters of embryonic stem cell research: “There is no ban at the present time on research in this country on embryonic stem cells.” — Sen. Tom Coburn
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Reality triumphs in Iraq debate
The Washington Post notes a sad victory for the reality-based community (via Josh Marshall): Republican lawmakers acknowledge that it is no longer tenable to say the news media are ignoring the good news in Iraq and painting an unfair picture of the war. In the first half of this year, 4,338 Iraqi civilians died violent
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The myth of Giuliani’s crime-fighting
If Rudy Giuliani runs for the GOP presidential nomination in 2008, we’re going to hear a lot of talk about how great a job he did fighting crime in New York City. The ever-compliant Chris Matthews recently touted Giuliani’s record on “Hardball”: Let me ask you about Rudy Giuliani. We just had a little joust
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Kerry’s stem cell “ban” rhetoric
John Kerry is still pushing the line that President Bush has instituted a “ban” on stem cell research (via OpinionJournal’s Best of the Web Today): “If you ever need to be reminded of why it’s morally right to lift the ban on stem cell research, just listen to Beth [a paralyzed Kerry intern],” Kerry said
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Atrios errs on Lieberman statement
Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Duncan Black, aka Atrios, explains why the left is angry with Joe Lieberman. In the process, though, he appears to make a factual error: Late last year, after President Bush’s job approval ratings hit record lows, Lieberman decided to lash out at the administration’s critics, writing in the ultraconservative