Uncategorized
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NYT shocked Obama didn’t end racial divide
Shorter New York Times: Barack Obama hasn’t magically healed racial divide in the US. He’s been the Democratic nominee for more than a month. What is he waiting for? Update 7/16 2:54 PM: Brad DeLong objects to the sample sizes used in the Times poll: I must admit that my breath is stopped by the
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Voinovich’s tricky ANWR spin
Via the New York Times, Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH) is using some slick spin to exaggerate the probable effect of drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in a statement supporting President Bush’s decision to lift an executive ban on offshore oil drilling: If we had started exploring ANWR 10 years ago when President Clinton
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Should Obama object to New Yorker cover?
TNR’s Isaac Chotiner wonders whether the Obama campaign should have objected to this New Yorker cover depicting Barack Obama as a Muslim and his wife as a black radical, which was intended to satirize conservative propaganda about the couple: What I do not understand, however, is why the Obama campaign has chosen to pick a
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Marshall suggests AP biased against Obama
In All the President’s Spin, we wrote about how liberals were increasingly adopting conservative tactics. The latest example: Josh Marshall saying the “Associated Press officially endorses McCain” (to which he added “Well, pretty much”) for running a negative story about Barack Obama. The article itself is less than ideal — it’s an example of the
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1990s: The lost decade
It seems increasingly clear that the post-Cold War/pre-9/11 era (1991-2001) will be seen by historians the way the 1920s are today — a time of decadence in which gathering domestic and foreign threats were neglected or ignored altogether. I was reminded of this by a New York Times article titled “American Energy Policy, Asleep at
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Obama and McCain: Not tied
Drudge is currently featuring a Rasmussen Reports poll with the headline “Poll: All tied up”. But there’s no particular reason to give that much credence to the Rasmussen poll, which shows the candidates tied at 46% (including leaners). The filtered poll averages of Wisconsin’s Charles Franklin at Pollster.com and UNC’s Jim Stimson still show Obama
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Sean Hannity misstates Obama’s tax plan
A few days ago, I heard Sean Hannity shout down a caller with the claim that Barack Obama was going to raise taxes on everyone by allowing all of President Bush’s tax cuts to expire. Thankfully, Media Matters got the transcript: HANNITY: You’ve raised a lot of good points here, Katie. Dallas, is there, is
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Back to blogging soon
I’m leaving Durham after EITM for the summer meeting of the Society for Political Methodology. Regular blogging will return soon now that my conference poster is finished…
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Wanted: Better blog post titles
It’s strange to me that so many bloggers write vague titles for their posts (random examples from my RSS reader: “Fantasyland,” “Optimal Control,” “The Catch-22”). Maybe it’s an aesthetic preference, but the reality is that your blog readers are busy people. Most of them are quickly scanning your blog online or (even worse) scrolling through
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Reuters sanitizes China crackdown
A Reuters story about the pre-Olympic crackdown on dissent going on in China right now features an especially Orwellian headline: China announces Olympics stability drive after riot “[S]tability drive”? What sort of bizarre euphemism is that and why is Reuters using it without scare quotes? (The phrase also appears in the article.) Did they get