Month: June 2008
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Reuters sanitizes China crackdown
A Reuters story about the pre-Olympic crackdown on dissent going on in China right now features an especially Orwellian headline: China announces Olympics stability drive after riot “[S]tability drive”? What sort of bizarre euphemism is that and why is Reuters using it without scare quotes? (The phrase also appears in the article.) Did they get
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Frank Rich reads Charles Black’s mind
Frank Rich asserted Sunday that John McCain adviser Charles Black’s comments to Fortune magazine (which McCain repudiated) weren’t an “improvisational mishap”: Don’t fault Charles Black, the John McCain adviser, for publicly stating his honest belief that a domestic terrorist attack would be “a big advantage” for their campaign and that Benazir Bhutto’s assassination had “helped”
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Ted Koppel vs. numbers
Maybe I’m being unfair, but when Ted Koppel misspeaks and tells Jon Stewart that China has “1.3 million people,” I can’t help but think of his 2000 comment about the debate over George W. Bush’s proposed tax cuts: KING: OK. Were you impressed with this fuzzy, top 1 percent, 1.3 trillion, 1.9 trillion bit? KOPPEL:
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Interest in a comment feed?
Are people interested in an RSS comments feed? The comments have been more active lately and a feed would make it easier to keep up with the back-and-forth. Let me know what you think…
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Leibovich’s Style section imperialism
Mark Leibovich, formerly of the loathsome and regrettably influential Washington Post Style section, continues to infect the New York Times with nonsense like this about Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s clothing and (supposed) body language: Woodstock or no, Unity at least provided the ultimate festival for students of political body language. Mr. Obama, the presumptive
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The Bush/McCain small business fallacy
For almost ten years, George W. Bush has repeatedly dissembled about the impact of his tax policies on small business (among other demographic groups). Many people (including me) have pointed these things out to the press. But as Paul Krugman points out, McCain is using the same playbook to vastly overstate the effect of Barack
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McCain’s supposed non-POW exploitation
John McCain is a genuine war hero, but how many times can he and his political campaigns exploit that experience before the press stops claiming that he doesn’t exploit it? McCain, who rarely discusses what is perhaps the most compelling element of his biography, used the new language twice on Tuesday to bring up his
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EITM blogging slowdown
Apologies for the limited blogging — we are currently hosting the seventh annual summer institute on Empirical Implications of Theoretical Models here at Duke. I’m both a participant and a graduate assistant so posting will be intermittent for the next couple of weeks.
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Stimson and Franklin horse race estimates
UNC’s James Stimson (the country’s leading analyst of macro public opinion) is posting daily horse race estimates for the presidential race on his website. Right now he has Obama at 53% of the two-party vote: It’s almost exactly consistent with the estimate by Wisconsin’s Charles Franklin that appears at Pollster.com: [Note that, unlike Stimson, Franklin’s
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Clark Hoyt on Maureen Dowd’s sexism
Clark Hoyt, the New York Times public editor and a national treasure, calls out the retrograde sexism of Maureen Dowd: Dowd’s columns about Clinton’s campaign were so loaded with language painting her as a 50-foot woman with a suffocating embrace, a conniving film noir dame and a victim dependent on her husband that they could