Month: November 2008
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Kathleen Parker: Correlation=causation
A conservative organization called the Intercollegiate Studies Institute has released a new report which shows (yet again) that most Americans don’t have extensive factual knowledge of politics. (Whether this matters very much is a question that has been widely debated among political scientists.) Based on this finding, the Washington Post’s Kathleen Parker embarassed herself and
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Misreporting the cost of the bailout(s)
Memo to journalists — as Kevin Drum points out, the cost of the various financial bailouts, loan guarantees, etc. are being wildly inflated in press reports: This stuff has gotten completely out of hand, with “estimates” of the bailout these days ranging from $3 trillion to $7 trillion even though the vast bulk of this
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More White House website scrubbing
The White House has been caught making undisclosed changes to its website again (see the full report): [H]istorians researching those early alliance-building efforts say they are troubled by what seem to be deletions of and alterations to the early official lists of nations that supported the war effort. The lists were posted on the White
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TNR debunks the Fairness Doctrine myth
TNR’s Marin Cogan has definitively debunked the conservative fear-mongering about Democrats reinstating the Fairness Doctrine that I questioned last week: Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and other friends have spent the past year screaming about the horrors of Barack Obama. And, while it’s true that they talked ad nauseam about socialism and the Weathermen and Jeremiah
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Nancy Pelosi channels Cuba Gooding Jr.
Apparently House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been watching “Jerry Maguire”: Democratic leaders in Congress sidetracked legislation to bail out the auto industry Thursday and demanded the Big Three develop a plan assuring the money would make them economically viable. “Until they show us the plan, we cannot show them the money,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.,
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Matt Bai: Wrong on demand for government
In Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, Matt Bai made the data-free assertion that “the American public doesn’t seem to move very much in its basic attitudes about government”: The cautionary note here, for jubilant Democrats, is that there is little reason to believe that the electoral trend in their favor actually reflects any widespread ideological
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The benefits of the Lieberman decision
Yesterday, Senate Democrats made the decision I predicted back in May and June and let Joe Lieberman keep his committee chairmanship. The reason is simple. As the New York Times notes, “Democrats want to avoid driving Mr. Lieberman into the Republican fold.” Lieberman’s voting record currently puts him in the middle of the Democratic caucus.
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Hertzberg’s fable about Obama’s race speech
Writing in The New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg novelizes Obama’s race speech into the act that won him the presidency: In his Philadelphia speech of March 18, 2008, prompted by the firestorm over his former pastor, he treated the American people as adults capable of complex thinking—as his equals, you might say. But what made that
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House GOP leadership moving right
Despite the election results, it looks like House Republicans are going to shift their leadership in a conservative direction. My friend and colleague Mike Brady, who studies Congress, put together a nice graph illustrating this point (the line represents DW-Nominate estimated ideal points on a left-right ideological dimension): House GOP Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) and
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The white Democratic vote in the South
I know the South is racially polarized and hostile to Democrats but I was still shocked that Obama only received 10-15 percent of the white vote in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana: Maybe I’m naïve, but I would have said 25-30 percent.