The grim news from the New York Times yesterday is that the swine flu vaccine is likely to cause an outbreak of misperceptions about its consequences for people’s health: As soon as swine flu vaccinations start next month, some people getting them will drop dead of heart attacks or strokes, some children will have seizures

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Via an NPR story on Houston, one of the great news ledes of all time: The constitutional right to have a giant inflatable gorilla in a bathing suit and sunglasses grabbing consumer attention from a Houston business rooftop is the key issue in a trial that began in federal court on Wednesday. Eternal vigilance is

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In a comment on my post about the 2010 midterms yesterday, Charlie Cook protests the “lack of focus on actual Congressional districts”: What I find interesting about this whole conversation is the lack of focus on actual Congressional districts. When you look at the 84 CD’s currently held by Democrats, that went for either Bush

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During his interview with President Clinton yesterday on Meet the Press, David Gregory asked a question that is increasingly occupying the minds of prominent Democrats — “do you worry about a repeat of ’94 politically?” Vice President Joe Biden raised a similar concern last week, telling attendees at a Democratic fundraiser in Delaware that “If

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Last week I criticized those conservatives who rushed to describe President Obama’s decision to withdraw a missile defense system from Eastern Europe as “appeasement.” The comparison to the appeasement of Hitler was simply absurd on its face. And, as I pointed out in a comment, the rationale for the move was unknown — how could

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[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 continues his interesting polling on political misperceptions in a new national poll (PDF) that was conducted Sept. 18-21 and

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Matthew Yglesias calls it “striking” that Mitt Romney and so many other conservatives are engaging in opportunistic position-taking against TARP: Dave Weigel points out that Mitt Romney is now slamming the TARP bill that he once favored. Shocking to see that guy change his position on something. But Romney aside, it’s striking to see the

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In an online column last week, Eric Alterman and co-author Mickey Ehrlich denied any parallel in levels of partisan support for the “birther” and “truther” misperceptions: David Paul Kuhn at Time.com attempted evenhandedness by introducing the results of supposed “truther” polls conducted in 2007. His claim is that the same number of Democrats believed that

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Back in 2006, I proposed the following corollary to Godwin’s law in a column for Time.com: A well-known rule of Internet discourse is Godwin’s law, which states that, as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches inevitability. Let me propose Nyhan’s corollary: As a foreign policy debate

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Back in August, I created this plot showing the parallels in partisan misperceptions about President Bush (a 9/11 conspiracy) and President Obama (not a citizen): Public Policy Polling just asked questions about both misperceptions in the same poll in New Jersey (PDF). While the 9/11 question, which asks whether the respondent thinks Bush had “advance

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