Month: March 2008
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Campaign for America’s Future: Nativist
In the conclusion of All the President’s Spin, we predicted that liberal organizations would increasingly adopt the PR tactics of conservatives. Sadly, what we predicted has come true over and over again during the last few years. A perfect example of this is a new Web video from Campaign for America’s Future, which has adapted
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Dick Cheney’s democratic disregard
I know I’m late to the party, but this Dick Cheney quote really is staggering: Five years after the start of the war in Iraq, Vice President Dick Cheney offered a positive assessment of the war today and called last year’s troop surge a “major success.” “On the security front, I think there’s a general
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Grandparent break
With my folks in town to see the littlest Nyhan, two conference papers to write, and March Madness under way, I’m on hiatus until next week. Enjoy the weekend…
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What happens if Obama loses big in PA?
Slate’s Mickey Kaus asks a good question: What do the Democrats do when Obama loses Pennsylvania, not by 10 or 15 points but by 20 or 25 points? That seems to be the way things are headed. … And, indeed, the polling trend from Pollster.com looks pretty grim (and this is before the Jeremiah Wright
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John McCain fails the Jeff Stein test
John McCain touts his military and foreign policy experience, but apparently doesn’t understand the most basic distinctions between Sunnis and Shiites (i.e. Iran is Shiite, Al Qaeda is Sunni). I think it’s time for reporters to ask all of our leaders the question Jeff Stein of CQ posed back in 2006: For the past several
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Bush thanks Paulson for working weekends
In the midst of the worst financial crisis since the Depression, did President Bush really thank Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson for working through the weekend? Mr. Bush singled out Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. for praise, saying he had shown “the country and the world that the United States is on top of the
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Obama, Wright, and district congruity
With Barack Obama preparing a major speech on race for tomorrow, it’s worth taking a step back to put the Jeremiah Wright controversy in a larger perspective. As TNR’s Michael Crowley reminds us here and here, Obama’s membership in Wright’s church helped demonstrate his cultural authenticity to skeptical constituents in Chicago’s black community. But it’s
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Bill Kristol: Wrong on Obama/Wright
Bill Kristol cites a report by the “journalist” Ronald Kessler in today’s New York Times claiming that Barack Obama attended an incendiary sermon by Jeremiah Wright on July 22, 2007: It certainly could be the case that Obama personally didn’t hear Wright’s 2003 sermon when he proclaimed: “The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger
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Blog regulation “probably unconstitutional”
I love this quote — a state representative from Kentucky admits that his bill banning anonymous blog comments is probably unconstitutional: In response to a constituent whose high school daughter had been the target of derogatory comments online, Tim Couch, a state representative for Kentucky’s 90th District, filed a bill to make it mandatory for
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Read The Black Swan
Like Matthew Yglesias, I’m a non-economist without much to say about the ongoing financial meltdown, but one recommendation I can make is that you should read The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It is by far the best thing I have read about the ways in which humans