Month: April 2008
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Anti-Obama smears from the fever swamp
I just deleted this comment from my post on the National Enquirer smearing Barack Obama: B HUSSEIN Obama IS a muslime, always was, always will be. He has sold out the USA for $200 MILLION from muslimes for his campaign. He will turn over the country to them if he wins. America will cease to
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Primaries aren’t like general elections
After weeks of bluster about Hillary Clinton’s strength in key general election states, it’s great to see the NYT’s Patrick Healy make an obvious but crucial point (I’ve been repeating this for weeks): [T]he Pennsylvania exit polls, conducted by Edison/Mitofsky for five television networks and The Associated Press, underscore a point that political analysts made
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Why John McCain is like George H.W. Bush
Historically, it seems to be relatively unusual for a party to nominate a heterodox candidate at a time when they control the presidency. That’s why I predicted (wrongly) that John McCain would not win the GOP nomination. McCain’s (exaggerated) reputation as a “maverick” is certainly an asset in the general election. But Democrats should remember
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Obama support graphs with PA
It’s time to update my previous work on the predictors of support for Barack Obama. Here are updated plots of state-level support for Obama by race, which show that Pennsylvania is sadly consistent with the overall trend of racial polarization: My standard regression shows that Obama’s state-level support is still associated with the same variables:
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NYT omits McCain’s supply-side remarks
The excellent New York Times economics reporter David Leonhardt has a profile of Douglas Holtz-Eakin, John McCain’s top economic adviser, in today’s newspaper that omits one very relevant fact. Leonhardt’s piece makes two important points. First, under Holtz-Eakin, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office started engaging in “dynamic” analysis of tax cuts but found that “any
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Dowd reads Obama’s mind on waffle
It’s time to break out the swami again. Maureen Dowd put her well-known psychic talents on display again today with this mind-reading of Barack Obama: He is frantic to get away from her because he can’t keep carbo-loading to relate to the common people. In the final days in Pennsylvania, he dutifully logged time at
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Obama/Osama sign at South Carolina church
The myths that Barack Obama is a Muslim and that he is somehow associated with Osama bin Laden continue to spread: The sign in front of a small church in a small town is causing a big controversy in Jonesville, S.C. Pastor Roger Byrd said that he just wanted to get people thinking. So last
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Hillary, Obama, and McCain on WWE Raw
The New York Times reports that the presidential candidates all appeared on WWE Raw last night. The results, which are summarized in this YouTube clip from the WWE, were not pretty: The full, cringe-inducing videos of the candidates’ appearances are below the fold (via CQ’s Craig Crawford). Apparently, the way to a WWE fan’s heart
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The Rockridge Institute folds
Surprisingly, The Rockridge Institute, the think tank of George Lakoff, has shut down. I’m not sad to see them go — I’m no fan of Lakoff or Rockridge, which we criticized in the conclusion to All the President’s Spin — but I would have assumed that Lakoff’s status as the (false) prophet of framing would
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Autism pandering from Obama and McCain
Barack Obama, who has criticized the politicization of science under George W. Bush, is doing some politicizing of his own. Yesterday, he joined John McCain in pandering to the vocal and well-organized lobby of parents who believe the increase in autism diagnoses is caused by vaccines: “We’ve seen just a skyrocketing autism rate. Some people