Month: March 2010
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Obama as a “polarizing” president
In today’s New York Times, Peter Beinart describes President Obama as having “failed in the effort to be the nonpolarizing president” and calls him “our third highly polarizing president in a row”: “Let’s face it, he’s failed in the effort to be the nonpolarizing president, the one who can use rationality and calm debate to
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Twitter roundup
From my Twitter feed: -Breakdowns of last night’s House vote on health care reform by the New York Times, Stanford’s Simon Jackman, and 538’s Nate Silver -John Thune is yet another GOP supply-sider with presidential aspirations: “I’m always for cutting … marginal rates because you get more revenue” –The unscientific state of forensic evidence in
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Kinsley wrong to blame inflation for decline in trust
Michael Kinsley is a brilliant writer, but sometimes it’s possible to be too glib. Take, for instance, his monocausal explanation in The Atlantic of the decline in trust in civic institutions and government: Furthermore, as Samuelson notes, the damage is more than just economic. These days everyone is disenchanted with civic institutions and government. They
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Obama and the Reagan myth revisited
As I’ve repeatedly noted, journalists have a tendency to attribute electoral outcomes and poll ratings to political tactics rather than the underlying fundamentals (most notably, the state of the economy). That’s why the current Obama blame game has been so painfully predictable. The latest example comes from TNR’s John Judis. To his credit, Judis has
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Twitter roundup
From my Twitter feed: -David Brooks: Hacky and wrong -Brad DeLong values bloggers on the Kaus scale — I’m available at those rates! -Rep. Alan Grayson has a dignity problem -Vaccine/autism link again discredited — someone tell the Huffington Post -I guarantee you’ve never heard anyone rap around Rutherford B. Hayes before -Judge concludes Filegate
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“Death panels” postmodernism
The latest example of conservative postmodernism comes from a Noah Schachtman’s Wired story on Andrew Breitbart (founder of the websites Big Journalism, Big Government, and Big Hollywood), which discusses Big Government blogger Michael Walsh’s utter indifference to the truth: The stories don’t even have to be true to be useful. In December, Big Government’s Michael
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Roger Cohen reads Obama’s mind
Via TAP’s Mori Dinauer, New York Times columnist Roger Cohen pretends to read Barack Obama’s mind — time to break out the swami (emphasis mine): The Obama presidency has been a shock to Europe. At heart, Obama is not a Westerner, not an Atlanticist. He grew up partly in Indonesia and partly in Hawaii, which
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Hack narratives on Obama’s decline
As predicted, the press continues to invent an array of silly narratives blaming the tactics of Obama and his staff for the President’s current political standing. The latest example is George Packer’s New Yorker article, which heads downhill from the hack subtitle “The President’s failure to connect with ordinary Americans.” As I wrote, presidents “connect”
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Will health care myths dissipate by November?
Mark Blumenthal of Pollster.com (where I frequently cross-post) has a new NationalJournal.com column discussing my claim that myths about health care reform are unlikely to be dispelled by November. Here’s how it begins: Last week, Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh said Democrats are betting that perceptions of the health care reform bill will improve once it
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Mann and Ornstein’s reconciliation infographic
Via Matthew Yglesias, Thomas Mann, Norm Ornstein, and Raffaela Wakeman have a new op-ed and infographic on reconciliation that nicely complements their TNR piece on the procedure and the Sunlight Foundation’s infographic: Bill Frist, a former Senate majority leader, called reconciliation an “arcane” procedure that Congress has “never used … to adopt major, substantive policy