Month: June 2007
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Inequality in theory and practice
There’s something bizarre about reading the New York Times Magazine cover package on “The Inequality Economy” amidst with the usual blizzard of ads for luxury goods like multimillion dollar apartments, vacation homes, jewelry, perfume, etc. The title page for the package (p. 51 in my print version) even appears directly opposite an ad for The
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Translating David Leonhardt
A reader wrote to question this confusing passage from David Leonhardt’s profile of Larry Summers in the Times Magazine: Summers’s favorite statistic these days is that, since 1979, the share of pretax income going to the top 1 percent of American households has risen by 7 percentage points, to 16 percent. Over the same span,
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NYT presents corporate group as neutral
In an article today, the New York Times quotes an economist from the Employment Policies Institute, describing it as “a nonprofit research group that studies issues of entry-level employment”: The number of unemployed youths age 16 to 24 increased by 658,000 last summer, according to the Labor Department . And, the department’s monthly job report
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John Edwards on Paris Hilton
Good to see John Edwards speaking up on the important issues: Even the presidential candidate John Edwards found himself drawn into the debate. When asked about Ms. Hilton’s release on Thursday he said, “Without regard to Paris Hilton, we have two Americas and I think what’s important is, it’s obvious that the problem exists.”
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Paul Krugman on debate coverage
I bad-mouthed lame debate commentary earlier this week, but Paul Krugman is absolutely correct that major misrepresentations need to be fact-checked: In Tuesday’s Republican presidential debate, Mitt Romney completely misrepresented how we ended up in Iraq. Later, Mike Huckabee mistakenly claimed that it was Ronald Reagan’s birthday. Guess which remark The Washington Post identified as
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Ajami asks for a Libby pardon
Fouad Ajami asks President Bush to pardon of Scooter Libby in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. Here’s the best passage: The men and women who entrusted you with the presidency, I dare say, are hard pressed to understand why former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who was the admitted leaker of Mrs. Wilson’s identity
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Kucinich works the Hollywood grassroots
My friend Ben Fritz reprints an inside-Hollywood email from “a relatively well known character actress” in which she offers to have Dennis Kucinich call her friends and acquaintances to discuss his candidacy. I know the man is at 1% in the polls, but if he has that much free time on his hands, shouldn’t he
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Fox News & correlation vs. causation
Eric Alterman is the latest pundit to make the unproven claim that Fox News reduces the information levels of its viewers: I've got a new “Think Again,” called “Modest and Respectful No More,” here, and the reason I idiotically went to New Hampshire in the first place, a Creative Coalition panel on the debates I
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When crazy candidates attack
I just came across an incredible campaign anecdote while working on my dissertation. Check out this excerpt from a Washington Post story on the 1978 US Senate race in Maine: Three independents are challenging Hathaway and Cohen, but only one of them, former state senator Hayes Gahagan, was expected to attract many votes. The campaign
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Daniel Henninger: Democratic theorist
In the spirit of James Taranto’s “Great Orators of the Democratic Party” theme, here’s some inspirational rhetoric on democracy from the Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henninger: People tend to regard the idea of “democratic” politics with high reverence, when in practice it consists most of the time of the right of any citizen to describe