Month: May 2009
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Liberals go soft on Sykes’s Limbaugh “jokes”
I try to avoid blogging about entertainers, but there’s no avoiding the fact that what comedian Wanda Sykes said about Rush Limbaugh at the White House Correspondents Association dinner was loathsome (video): “Rush Limbaugh said he hopes this administration fails,” Sykes said. “So you’re saying, ‘I hope America fails’, you’re, like, ‘I don’t care about
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How far left has Specter moved?
While I stand by my claim that the significance of Arlen Specter’s party switch has been exaggerated, it’s still interesting to see how his voting patterns have changed since he defected from the GOP caucus. Stanford’s Simon Jackman has estimated an ideal point model for the 111th Senate treating Specter as a new legislator since
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Immigration politics in lucha libre
As someone who grew up watching WWF when the heels were often Russian or Middle Eastern cultural stereotypes, it’s fascinating (though not wholly suprising) that Mexican pro wrestling, which is known as “lucha libre,” has created anti-immigrant villains known as the Foreign Legion: It was billed as an invasion. On a chartered tour bus carrying
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The Congressional myth caucus revisited
Last month, I mocked two especially stupid bills in the House of Representatives. The first opposes the US dropping the dollar and the second opposes creation of a NAFTA superhighway. Unfortunately, both bills are based on misperceptions (see here and here, respectively). At the time, I dubbed the members of the House who sponsored or
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Scott Shane on the torture counterfactual
One more note on the importance of counterfactual reasoning in the debate over the effectiveness of torture, which I’ve recently highlighted in two posts (here and here). In a Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross that I only heard recently, New York Times reporter Scott Shane offered the most detailed exposition of this point that
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Nate Silver: Smart, but not a social scientist
As a political scientist, it’s often frustrating to see Nate Silver being treated as an expert in the quantitative study of politics. Silver is obviously very bright, but he is a blogger who can run regressions and make charts, not a trained social scientist. As a result, while I like his energy and his quantitative