Month: July 2009
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Disturbing poll on beliefs about Obama’s birth
[Update (6/30/10): Serious questions have been raised about the validity of Research 2000’s polls. The results below should thus be viewed as potentially suspect until the matter is resolved.] Via Matthew Yglesias and Taegan Goddard, a new Daily Kos-sponsored poll from Research 2000 finds that only 77% of Americans, and 42% of Republicans, believe Obama
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Overstating public incoherence on the deficit
Matthew Yglesias calls the public “ill-informed and hypocritical” based on a New York Times poll that found “Most Americans continue to want the federal government to focus on reducing the budget deficit rather than spending money to stimulate the national economy… [y]et at the same time, most oppose some proposed solution for decreasing it.” The
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Eugene Robinson reads Sgt. Crowley’s mind
Bob Somerby has caught another pundit exercising his psychic powers in the Henry Louis Gates affair. Following in Judith Warner’s footsteps, the Washington Post’s columnist Eugene Robinson has published a column in which he purports to read Crowley’s mind (my emphasis): [F]or the sake of argument, let’s assume that Crowley’s version of the incident is
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More conservatives denounce birthers
Time to add Bill Pascoe, a former GOP operative now blogging at CQ Politics, the editors of National Review (via Andrew Sullivan), and Mary Katherine Ham of The Weekly Standard to the growing list of conservatives (headed by Michael Medved) who have denounced the Obama birth certificate myth. As I noted yesterday, even Ann Coulter
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Dobbs: “Obama is a citizen … in my opinion”
Last night Lou Dobbs revisited the Obama birth certificate misperception on his CNN show. With pressure growing against him and his network, he did not encourage birther conspiracy theories in his normal fashion. However, even while backtracking on the issue, Dobbs twice mischaracterized Obama’s citizenship as a matter of opinion rather than fact (my emphasis):
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Michael Medved: Myth-busting hero
To change elite incentives, we need to not only shame elites who promote misperceptions like the Obama birth certificate myth but reward those who debunk them, especially on the side that is promoting the myth. That’s why we should honor Michael Medved, a conservative talk radio host, for taking a leading role in fighting the
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Shaming CNN and the birthers in Congress
With my research indicating that corrections are frequently ineffective (here and here), I’ve recently argued that the most effective way to combat misperceptions is to shame the elites that promote them. It’s time to put that strategy to work. Specifically, we’ve reached a crucial moment in the debate over the increasingly popular misperception that President
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Reading the minds of Gates and Crowley
America’s pundits are rushing to meet the demand for commentary on the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr by Cambridge police officer James Crowley. A lack of agreed-upon facts is no obstacle! For example, Bob Somerby flags Judith Warner asserting in the New York Times that Crowley’s report is wrong about a disputed
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The end of the Obama honeymoon
Just to briefly elaborate on the point I made last week, here are comparable plots of President Obama’s overall job approval and approval of his handling of health care: As you can see, what’s happening on health care is a leading indicator of the end of Obama’s honeymoon period. As we return to our normal,
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The Dadaist Sarah Palin
The resentment politics of Sarah Palin have always had a Dadaist quality to them, as in this bizarre passage about the media from her farewell speech to Alaska (via the New York Post and Salon.com): “First, some straight talk for some — just some — in the media because another right protected for all of