Month: May 2008
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How bad was MS-01 for the GOP?
American University’s Brian Schaffner has a nice graph illustrating the implications of the GOP’s defeat in the special election in Mississippi’s first district. He plots the vote for GOP House candidates in open seat elections in 2006 against President Bush’s vote total in the district in the 2004 election and then superimposes the MS-1 result
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Quick KY and OR results analysis
Updating my series on the state-level predictors of Obama support, the graphs below (which include 95% confidence intervals around predicted linear fits using data from before yesterday’s primaries) show that white support for Obama in Oregon and Kentucky fits the pattern we expect by education but not by black population:
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The insipid Iran threat debate
Are the presidential candidates actually going to have a debate about whether the threat posed by Iran is comparable to the previous threat posed by the USSR? Republican John McCain accused Democrat Barack Obama of inexperience and reckless judgment for saying Iran does not pose the same serious threat to the United States as the
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Why Al Gore’s favorables improved
I’m obviously sympathetic to Ezra Klein’s critique of the “gaffe-hunting, sound-bite-obsessed media,” but I have to take issue with this passage: Filtered through the lens of a couple of awkward turns of phrase and an oratorical style that could seem tendentious, Gore was seen, in 2000, as a condescending, exaggeration-prone prig. But in the ensuing
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Bush’s history on appeasement/strawmen
Back in 2006, I proposed Nyhan’s corollary to Godwin’s law in a column for Time.com: A well-known rule of Internet discourse is Godwin’s law, which states that, as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches inevitability. Let me propose Nyhan’s corollary: As a foreign policy debate with
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Fact-checking Matthews on Obama and pool
There’s no fact that Chris Matthews
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West Virginia results by demographics
As predicted, Obama got drubbed in West Virginia, so it’s time to update my series on the predictors of his state-level support. If we put the exit poll data in context, we can see that he did much worse among whites in West Virginia than we would expect based in states with similar black populations:
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NPR story on transgender children
Don’t miss Alix Spiegel’s NPR series (part one, part two) on the struggles of families with transgender children, though it will break your heart. Our society has such a long way to go in how we deal with these issues. As Spiegel notes, the parallels to the “treatment” of homosexuality in past decades are all
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The Obama plague!
Did The Onion ghostwrite this Robert Novak column on conservatives “[promoting] the biblical justification for an Obama plague-like presidency”? Can this possibly be real? Some U.S. Christians are not reconciled to McCain’s candidacy but instead regard the prospective presidency of Barack Obama in the nature of a biblical plague visited upon a sinful people. These
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Great moments in Supreme Court citations
Some Antonin Scalia news you can use from Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick: [Antonin] Scalia’s writing style is a disarming mix of the lowbrow and the lofty. He recently served up the Supreme Court’s first citation to Oscar the Grouch (PDF).