Month: May 2007
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More on Obama, drugs, and stereotypes
Matthew Yglesias takes issue with my concern that Barack Obama’s admitted history of drug use will be used to trigger racial stereotypes among voters: I dunno about this. It seems to me that if you have an African-American candidate whose admitted to past cocaine use, that attacking him for past cocaine use is less an
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Fact-checking Lou Dobbs on leprosy
Via Tyler Cowen, David Leonhardt of the New York Times has performed some much-needed fact-checking on CNN’s Lou Dobbs: The whole controversy involving Lou Dobbs and leprosy started with a “60 Minutes” segment a few weeks ago. The segment was a profile of Mr. Dobbs, and while doing background research for it, a “60 Minutes”
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NYT public editor knocks caption
As I noted yesterday, the New York Times ran this caption alongside an article about opposing pro- and anti-war demonstrations at a street corner in Delaware: Jeffery Broderick, foreground, standing alone last week in support of United States troops as demonstrators for peace occupy an opposite corner. This language clearly suggests that Broderick “alone” supports
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McCain attacks Obama’s drug use
John McCain’s slam on Barack Obama last week is the first prominent attack on Obama’s admitted drug use: McCain responds to Obama in tough enough, if predictable, language: “While Senator Obama’s two years in the U.S. Senate certainly entitle him to vote against funding our troops, my service and experience combined with conversations with military
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NYT caption smears war opponents
Reader Joel Wiles flags a caption in the New York Times suggesting that opponents of the war in Iraq do not support the troops. The article in question describes pro- and anti-war demonstrators who stand on opposite corners of an intersection in Delaware: On one side of the street, Jeff Broderick stands alone while he
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AP: Obama, Clinton “appeased” base
The #1 rule of horse race journalism is that all decisions are motivated by politics. The latest example: Associated Press writer Liz Sidoti’s assertions that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama opposed the Iraq war funding bill because they are “[c]ourting the anti-war constituency” and that their votes “appeased the Democratic base”:: Courting the anti-war constituency,
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NYT botches impeachment again
It’s always surprising to me how few people understand the impeachment process. Under the Constitution, the House impeaches federal officials and then the Senate votes on whether to convict them and remove them from office or not. Impeachment is not equivalent to removal from office. The New York Times made this mistake for the second
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Ideological affirmative action is bad
After approvingly quoting a Wall Street Journal op-ed (sub. req.) suggesting that political extremists impose externalities on the rest of us, Harvard economist Greg Mankiw makes the misguided suggestion that universities should have ideological affirmative action: To foster tolerance, what we need is more interaction among people with opposite viewpoints. How about a student exchange
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Sage words from Jeff Sessions
Thank goodness for the members of the “world’s greatest deliberative body.” What would we do without insights like this? Hours before the great immigration debate began in the Senate yesterday, Sen. Jeff Sessions was polishing his arguments at a news conference in a park across from the Capitol. “This bill,” the Alabama Republican told the
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WSJ dissembles on status of the poor
Time for yet another reminder of why you can never, ever trust the Wall Street Journal editorial page. This is a basic rule for life — the intellectual equivalent of telling children not to talk to strangers. Here’s what the Journal wrote (sub. req.) about a new Congressional Budget Office study (PDF) in an editorial