Month: November 2009
-
John Shadegg uses baby as a prop
Breaking new ground in the use of props on the floor of Congress, Rep. John Shadegg (R-AZ) dispensed with Robin Hood quotes and cartoon dragons. Instead, he took the even classier route of holding up a baby and putting words into her mouth (via NPR): As member of the House debated the health care reform
-
The House health care vote
Since people seemed to like my post on the Coburn amendment, here are some political science visualizations of the 220-215 final passage vote on the House health care bill. First, here is Royce Carrol’s auto-generated plot of the vote using Lewis-Poole optimal classification estimates: The cutting line, which represents the best-fitting line separating yes from
-
Twitter feed: @BrendanNyhan
For those who want to know about new posts but don’t use RSS, I’ve created a Twitter feed linking to my posts here. (I may post original content there as well at some point, but no promises!)
-
The Coburn amendment vote
Yesterday the Senate defeated Tom Coburn’s amendment to kill the National Science Foundation’s political science program — which had my colleagues up in arms — by a 62-36 vote that broke down largely along party lines: Party Yes No Democrats 5 53 Republicans 31 9 To understand the vote breakdown better, we can use this
-
VA/NJ governor races not predictive
Underscoring a point I’ve made several times in the last week, Alan Abramowitz, a respected political scientist at Emory University, has a new analysis showing that the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial results are not predictive of midterm election seat changes: [T]he results of the previous year’s gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey did
-
WSJ vs. WSJ on 2009 elections
Wall Street Journal, 11/3/09: Republicans Are Poised for Gains in Key Elections Outcomes in New York, New Jersey and Virginia Are Unlikely to Forecast Much About National Races in 2010, History Shows Republicans appear positioned for strong results in three hard-fought elections Tuesday. But isolated, off-year contests aren’t always reliable indicators of what will happen
-
Frank Rich: Hack
As TNR’s Jon Chait points out, Frank Rich’s column about GOP infighting in New York’s 23rd Congressional district is full of nasty rhetoric comparing the GOP to murderous regimes, cults, etc.: [T]he real action migrated to New York’s 23rd, a rural Congressional district abutting Canada… [T]his pastoral setting could become a G.O.P. killing field… …[T]he
-
WSJ: “all medicine will be rationed”
The Wall Street Journal editorial board goes back to the future in the fight against health care reform with this remix of Betsy McCaughey’s false claim about the Clinton health care plan: ObamaCare so dramatically expands government control of health care that eventually all medicine will be rationed via politics. But unlike McCaughey, whose claim
-
Alexander wistful for bipartisanship
Lamar Alexander is the latest elite to push the golden age of bipartisanship meme: The No. 3 Republican in the Senate, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, who attended one session with the president, recalled that in the 1960s, when he was a Congressional aide, Democrats and Republicans worked together on civil rights. He said he saw