Month: April 2008
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The frustrating NYT Magazine “green issue”
Today’s New York Times Magazine is a “green issue” that is full of interesting and clever ideas for reducing carbon emissions, especially at the individual level. But the issue is ultimately frustrating to read because most of the ideas (which are often complicated and difficult to implement) will never come into wide use without better
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Gibson and McCain: Lousy economists
Can we all agree that ABC’s Charlie Gibson should stop pretending to understand economics? Here’s what he said at the latest Democratic primary debate: -“Bill Clinton in 1997 signed legislation that dropped the capital gains tax to 20 percent and George Bush has taken it down to 15 percent and in each instance when the
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Russert & Marshall on Obama pledge myth
Last week Tim Russert debunked Bill Clinton’s misleading explanation of Hillary Clinton’s false claims about a trip to Bosnia with a gusto that has been missing for most of the Bush years. As Josh Marshall points out, that fact-checking gusto was also missing this week when Russert repeated the false claim that a picture of
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More high-tech politics: Progressive Clarity
A week ago I argued that the creation of the Analyst Institute, which describes itself as “Moneyball for progressive politics,” is an important indication that political organizations are finally starting to take measurement and experimental evaluation seriously. Here’s another sign — a group called Progressive Clarity is looking to hire two political methodologists to do
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Picking Chelsea Clinton pictures
I’m not one of those people who sees media bias in every picture choice by newspaper editors, but Chelsea Clinton has been getting a bad deal lately. First, Politico ran a story on her press aide, Philippe Reines, that included a picture of him standing behind her looking like a psycho: Then a critical Los
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The ABC debate debacle
I couldn’t make myself suffer through yet another silly debate, and it seems like that was a good decision. As Media Matters notes, “[n]umerous media figures have criticized George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson, moderators of the Democratic presidential debate on ABC, or the subject matter of the event, in part or in whole, as ‘shoddy
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Gail Collins needs a copyeditor
Just for the record, this sentence from Gail Colllins’s op-ed yesterday is wrong: Witness Obama and Clinton at the debate, racing away from gun control as if they were a pair of greyhounds, forswearing middle-class tax cuts as if they were George H.W. Bush. Actually, they ruled out middle-class tax increases. As her own newspaper
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Bartels on the political science of “bitter”
Larry Bartels, an eminent political scientist at Princeton, writes in the New York Times about how Obama’s description of less educated rural voters is wrong: For the sake of concreteness, let’s define the people Mr. Obama had in mind as people whose family incomes are less than $60,000 (an amount that divides the electorate roughly
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Weisberg and the narrative of Bush
Writing about the construction of campaign narratives reminds me of a Jacob Weisberg quote about his new Bush book that has been bugging me for a while. Weisberg, who is the editor of Slate, is known as one of the smartest political journalists in Washington, which is why I think this quote from his Fresh
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Limbaugh: “Liberalism is the greatest threat”
Rush Limbaugh just called liberalism “the greatest threat this country faces”: [L]iberalism is the greatest threat this country faces, not Islamofascism, because if the liberals dominate and win, and are in power for four, eight years or more, they don’t take Islamofascism as a threat. And we know this because the Islamofascists are actually campaigning