Month: August 2009
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Health care/birther misinformation playbook
Between the birthers who promote the myth that the President was not born in this country and opponents of health care reform who falsely claim the legislation would promote euthanasia, there is a lot of misinformation floating around about the Obama administration. That shouldn’t be surprising, though; Obama’s honeymoon is ending. What is striking is
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Gelman and Sides on 2008 election narratives
The political scientists Andrew Gelman and John Sides have published a must-read Boston Review article that fact-checks various popular claims about the results of the 2008 election. Send it to your favorite political journalist!
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Radio interview on White House v. Drudge
For those who are interested, I’ll be talking about the White House response to the misleading Drudge health care video today around 3:10 PM EST on KUOW (NPR) Seattle’s The Conversation with Ross Reynolds.
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VA poll backs Kos result on Obama birth
[Update (6/30/10): Serious questions have been raised about the validity of Research 2000’s polls. The results discussed below should thus be viewed as potentially suspect until the matter is resolved.] Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling just reported on Twitter that a new poll his firm conducted finds that only 32% of Virginia Republicans think
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Creating unidimensionality in Congress
Matthew Yglesias and Paul Krugman comment on the finding by political scientists Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal that Congress is essentially one-dimensional in the post-civil rights era — here’s Yglesias: We often think of a simple 2-dimensional models like the Nolan Chart in which people should be sorted along both a left-right axis about economics,