Month: May 2008
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Joe Klein reads Hillary’s mind
Bob Somerby flags some absurd mind-reading by Time’s Joe Klein, who claims to know that Hillary Clinton’s two innocuous references to RFK’s 1968 assassination mean “that Obama’s vulnerability to racist nutjobs has been in her mind for months now”: I take all of Karen’s points below—and the fact that Hillary Clinton mentioned Bobby Kennedy’s assassination
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Do divided parties matter?
Paul Krugman is worried that divisions within the Democratic Party will cost it the presidency in an otherwise favorable year: Here’s the point: the nightmare Mr. Obama and his supporters should fear is that in an election year in which everything favors the Democrats, he will nonetheless manage to lose. He needs to do everything
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Hillary’s bogus 1968 and 1992 comparisons
The firestorm over Hillary Clinton’s mention of the RFK’s assassination seems overblown to me — I don’t see any reason to believe she was bringing it up to suggest that Barack Obama would be assassinated. The problem is the misleading comparisons she was making to 1968 and especially 1992, which were debunked in the New
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NYT repeats phony Obama quote
The New York Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller repeats the myth that Barack Obama said Hillary Clinton was pretending to hunt ducks with a revolver in a Week in Review article today: Mrs. Clinton and Mr. McCain have both derided Mr. Obama as “elitist” for his remarks about bitter rural voters who “cling” to guns and
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How to predict the general election
The usually savvy Matthew Yglesias gets things a bit wrong in this post on the utility of state-level polling: It’s really too bad that the folks behind Five Thirty Eight.com have gone and created such a compelling website based around state-by-state general election polling. It’s all really well done and, as such, I can’t really
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This American Life on the financial crisis
If you’ve had a hard time making sense of the financial crisis that came out of the housing bubble, This American Life co-produced an entertaining show on the subject with NPR News that does a great job of making the story understandable. Highly recommended.
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Tucker Carlson for president?
Via Mike Munger, my department chair here at Duke and the Libertarian candidate for governor of North Carolina, there are rumors that Tucker Carlson may take a shot at the Libertarian presidential nomination. I’m not sure if this is for real or not, but I’m not as surprised by the idea as you might think.
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NYT corrects Obama myths in FL
The New York Times has a nice article today correcting various misperceptions about Barack Obama that were reported by older Jewish voters in Florida: Because of a dispute over moving the date of the state’s primary, Mr. Obama and the other Democratic candidates did not campaign in Florida. In his absence, novel and exotic rumors
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Hillary’s outlandish FL/MI rhetoric
Like Rick James, Hillary Clinton is a habitual line-stepper. The latest: comparing the non-recognition of the Florida and Michigan primaries to slavery and civil rights along with Zimbabwe. How long will this scorched-earth strategy go on?
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The 22nd Amendment strikes back
I have no idea if the report out of Israel that President Bush wants to attack Iran before leaving office is true (the White House denies it), but the fact that we’re debating it should highlight the problem with the 22nd Amendment, which removes democratic accountability from second-term presidents. President Bush is deeply unpopular, but