Month: December 2007
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The NY Post’s Ike Turner headline
The New York Post’s headline on Ike Turner, who died at age 76 before his ex-wife Tina: IKE ‘BEATS’ TINA TO DEATH Using domestic violence humor in a death headline is ugly even by tabloid standards. Stay classy! Update 12/18 1:26 PM: I see Gawker beat me to this one.
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Goldberg: Swarthmore teachers are fascists
Via Matthew Yglesias, the great thinker Jonah Goldberg has published the “book” that I mocked a couple of years ago: Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. Its jacket features this immortal line about my alma mater (also in the Amazon summary text): Fascism was an
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Ezra Klein on Hillary polarization
Ezra Klein follows up on the Hillary polarization post I objected to with a LA Times op-ed on the subject. Here’s the punchline: Those numbers tell a couple of different stories. The first is that it’s probably a mistake to compare Hillary Clinton with the other presidential hopefuls. Her many years as one of the
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Media story-telling on Obama and Huckabee
Right now, the nation’s media is faced with a key challenge: explaining the rise of Mike Huckabee and Barack Obama in their respective party’s primaries. But rather than study the polling data, most journalists will focus on what they do best — making up stories after the fact based on campaign events to “explain” something
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How to counter anti-Mormon bias
Vanderbilt’s John Geer and Brett Benson and Claremont Graduate University’s Jennifer Merolla have released a new study on the extent of anti-Mormon bias among the public and the best ways to counter it: Bias against Mormons is significantly more intense among the public than bias against either African Americans or women, according to a new
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NYT: Policy vs. reality
My friend Ben Fritz noted an interesting contradiction. Here’s New York Times editor Bill Keller in a public memo on June 23, 2005 (PDF): Our policy on anonymous sources is a good one, and bears repeating. It begins: “We resist granting anonymity except as a last resort to obtain information that we believe to be
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The timing of conservative in-fighting
Andrew Sullivan asks why Rich Lowry and Charles Krauthammer are suddenly up in arms about the increasingly dogmatic strain of religious conservatism in the Republican Party: It’s amazing to me to watch Rich Lowry and Charles Krauthammer begin to panic at the signs of Christianism taking over the Republican party. Where, one wonders, have they
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Actual tax and budget reporting in the Post
One thing you rarely see in tax and budget reporting is an explicit juxtaposition of the cost of domestic discretionary spending with tax cuts. As the Washington Post reports today, President Bush is fighting fiercely over relatively small differences in domestic discretionary spending while advocating an unfunded fix of the alternative minimum tax that dwarfs
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Class and the Bronx Family Court
My friend Ben Fritz flags a disturbing story about the Bronx Family Court, where the elevators haven’t worked properly for a year: Lines to use a working elevator can stretch around the corner. People sometimes wait for hours to get to hearings, which are held on the seventh and eighth floors. Frequently, hearings have to
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“Food miles” make no sense
At what point will people realize that it is impossible to measure the carbon footprint of the food they buy? The concept of “food miles” is only a small part of the story. Consider this case of the potato chip, which is discussed in an op-ed in today’s New York Times: And while it might