Month: November 2006
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Beck and NY Post demand proof of loyalty
Media Matters has documented two outrageous attacks on dissent in which a conservative talk show host and the New York Post editorial board demand that Democrats prove their allegiance to this country. In the first, the group points out that CNN Headline News host Glenn Beck recently hit Keith Ellison, a newly-elected Muslim member of
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Does media cater to consumer bias?
If you ever doubted the impact of economic motivations on press behavior, the spectacle of ABC’s Mark Halperin groveling for conservative support before the election should have cured you. Here’s what Halperin said on “The O’Reilly Factor”: “[A]s an economic model, if you want to thrive like Fox News Channel, you want to have a
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Presidential rhetoric over time
Via Crooked Timber, here’s a neat tool — the US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud, which shows “the popularity, frequency, and trends in the usages of words within speeches, official documents, declarations, and letters written by the Presidents of the US between 1776 – 2006.” You can adjust a slider to move through time and see
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Slate’s Will Saletan on Iraq and welfare reform
I’m not a big fan of Slate’s trademark “everything you know is wrong” pieces, but Will Saletan’s article on how conservatives have failed to apply the lessons of welfare reform to Iraq is very clever: [A]nti-communism abroad was only one of Reagan’s theories. Another was anti-socialism at home. A government that spends tens of billions
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Hillary’s absurd spending in NY
Today’s New York Times features a graphic that illustrates just how disproportionate Hillary Clinton’s spending was in her Senate race: If the Democrats hadn’t taken back the House and Senate, people would be asking why Hillary didn’t give more of that money to other candidates. She certainly didn’t need it. Update 11/15 5:31 AM: Kevin
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Karl Rove on THE math
Karl Rove’s pre-election exchange with NPR’s Robert Siegel is hilarious: SIEGEL: We’re in the home stretch, though, and many would consider you on the optimistic end of realism about – ROVE: Not that you would be exhibiting a bias … SIEGEL: I’m looking at all the same polls that you’re looking at every day. ROVE:
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NYT’s Jennifer Steinhauer on California
Fresh from caricaturing Nancy Pelosi with the misleading claim that she “favors… schools without prayer and death with taxes,” New York Times Los Angeles bureau chief Jennifer Steinhauer gives California the same treatment in today’s edition, referring to it as a place where “American values are said to go to die” and as having an
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Jon Chait on the GOP’s postelection spin
LA Times columnist Jon Chait (also of TNR) has written an amusing and insightful look at the wave of post-election spin from the right – not to be missed.
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Grover Norquist on Iraq: Then and now
Grover Norquist in the New York Times Week in Review on Sunday: “There were no conservative grass-roots group saying, ‘Invade Iraq,’” Mr. Norquist said. “If Bush changed the policy, you’d have four neocons whine and the rest of the movement would be fine.” Grover Norquist in the Washington Post, April 10, 2003: “‘The Democrats were
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New third-party hypesters: Hotsoup.com
Joe Lockhart and Mark McKinnon, two of the founders of the latest useless online political forum, Hotsoup.com, published a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel op-ed yesterday hyping the third party threat for 2008: An analysis of exit polls from the 2004 presidential election reveal that while the percentage of ticket-splitting voters has decreased every election since 1988,