Brendan Nyhan

Month: July 2008

  • Marshall suggests AP biased against Obama

    In All the President’s Spin, we wrote about how liberals were increasingly adopting conservative tactics. The latest example: Josh Marshall saying the “Associated Press officially endorses McCain” (to which he added “Well, pretty much”) for running a negative story about Barack Obama. The article itself is less than ideal — it’s an example of the

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  • 1990s: The lost decade

    It seems increasingly clear that the post-Cold War/pre-9/11 era (1991-2001) will be seen by historians the way the 1920s are today — a time of decadence in which gathering domestic and foreign threats were neglected or ignored altogether. I was reminded of this by a New York Times article titled “American Energy Policy, Asleep at

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  • Obama and McCain: Not tied

    Drudge is currently featuring a Rasmussen Reports poll with the headline “Poll: All tied up”. But there’s no particular reason to give that much credence to the Rasmussen poll, which shows the candidates tied at 46% (including leaners). The filtered poll averages of Wisconsin’s Charles Franklin at Pollster.com and UNC’s Jim Stimson still show Obama

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  • Sean Hannity misstates Obama’s tax plan

    A few days ago, I heard Sean Hannity shout down a caller with the claim that Barack Obama was going to raise taxes on everyone by allowing all of President Bush’s tax cuts to expire. Thankfully, Media Matters got the transcript: HANNITY: You’ve raised a lot of good points here, Katie. Dallas, is there, is

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  • Back to blogging soon

    I’m leaving Durham after EITM for the summer meeting of the Society for Political Methodology. Regular blogging will return soon now that my conference poster is finished…

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  • Wanted: Better blog post titles

    It’s strange to me that so many bloggers write vague titles for their posts (random examples from my RSS reader: “Fantasyland,” “Optimal Control,” “The Catch-22”). Maybe it’s an aesthetic preference, but the reality is that your blog readers are busy people. Most of them are quickly scanning your blog online or (even worse) scrolling through

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