Month: October 2009
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PPP poll on Obama’s love of country
A national survey by Public Policy Polling found that 48% of Republicans (and 26% of Americans generally) endorsed the unsupported smear that President Obama doesn’t love America (27% of Republicans said Obama does love America and 25% were not sure). Those numbers are even worse than the myth that Obama wasn’t born in this country,
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Communist kitsch alert
Sunday’s LA Times story on the commercial exploitation of Mao Tse-tung in his hometown was weird enough (Mao snow globes!), but today’s NY Times brings news of my favorite bit of Communist kitsch ever: the “Ho Chi Minh Golf Trail”,* which the Times describes as “a series of eight courses whose label is as good
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The Petraeus for president boomlet
Bloggers have done a good job of listing the reasons the David Petraeus for president boomlet is silly and unlikely to succeed. The central problem is that potential biography candidates like Colin Powell in 1996, Wes Clark in 2004, or Petraeus haven’t ever run for political office. I don’t think most people realize how difficult
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AP asks if Obama is too articulate
Liz Sidoti of the Associated Press has written the most insipid news analysis on the Obama presidency in recent memory. Here’s the key passage, which culminates in Sidoti asking if Obama is “obnoxiously articulate”: Obama has been a constant presence in the mass media as he expands the bureaucracy’s reach into the private sector while
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Bill Maher spreads flu vaccine myths
The NYT’s Tara Parker-Pope has a great fact-checking post on the misinformation about the H1N1 “swine flu” vaccine being promoted by Bill Maher on his HBO show: The talk show host Bill Maher is best known for his pointed political commentary. But lately he has been dispensing surprisingly unscientific medical advice about flu and the
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Flu vaccine myths pervasive
Things are looking grim on the H1N1 “swine flu” vaccine misperception front. Know-nothing pundits like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Bill Maher are already suggesting that the vaccine is unnecessary or dangerous. These beliefs are apparently widespread — fewer than half of all parents are currently planning to vaccinate their children, and many of them
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This American Life on health care
Back in May of last year, I recommended a This American Life episode on the financial crisis titled “The Giant Pool of Money”. Let me do the same with part one of their new health care primer, which is titled “More is Less” (part two is coming next week). The portion I’ve listened to thus
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DNC compares GOP to terrorists
In a rejoinder to criticism of Obama’s Nobel Prize by RNC chair Michael Steele, DNC communications director Brad Woodhouse smeared the GOP as having “thrown in its lot with the terrorists – the Taliban and Hamas”: “The Republican Party has thrown in its lot with the terrorists – the Taliban and Hamas this morning –
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Paul Broun smears Nancy Pelosi
Via Talking Points Memo, Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) recently called Nancy Pelosi one of the “domestic enemies of the Constitution” shortly after saying that “[Second Amendment] gun rights are actually critical to prevent treason in America” (emphasis added): We’ve lost a lot of freedom in America. People just don’t understand how much we’ve lost. I
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McCaughey: Still a worthy target?
CJR’s Greg Marx has a nice post up assessing the value of targeting professional health care dissembler Betsy McCaughey. On the one hand, as he notes, she’s had a profoundly negative impact on mainstream debate and deserves to be “named and shamed” for her deceptions. For that reason, I’m happy to see TNR publishing a